On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Dave Reisner <d@falconindy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 09:30:01AM -0500, Jeremy Heiner wrote:
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 9:12 AM, Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org> wrote:
From searching around, we are definitely not the first people to run into this issue, but seem to be the only ones who are trying to code around.
Allan
I think the reason is that most libraries that face this issue have more exposure to it than libalpm does. For example GPGME passes file descriptors across its API, and that is a much bigger can of worms. It's not surprising that they choose to avoid that mess. But the libalpm API only passes off_t across. All the file stuff is completely encapsulated, so most of the largefile problems are simply not problems for libalpm. Jeremy
A cursory examination of alpm.h shows that this is definitely not the case -- it isn't only the "file stuff", and even that API isn't abstracted away since we publicly expose off_t in some of our structs. And, we have callbacks which pass off_t as well. At best, you read a corrupt value. At worst, you crash after wrongly calculating offsets of other struct members.
This isn't a new problem for alpm or anyone else dealing with large files. It's simply a trait of the target system which has to be adhered to.
I propose we do nothing.
d
Hi, Dave. Thanks for your reply, but I am a bit confused. I said that the only exposure the libalpm API has to the largefile problems is that it passes off_t across. You seem to be saying there is greater exposure than that, but all the examples you pointed to are where off_t is being passed across the API. I did look carefully through the API for any other largefile issues and found zero. Of course I am only human. So if, as you said, that "is definitely not the case", then could you please point me to where the exposure (other than off_t) is in the libalpm API? Jeremy