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Re: BUG: alternatives


Christopher Faylor wrote:

A signal shouldn't cause a truncated read when retrieving data from
disk on cygwin or linux.

ACK.


I think the only sane way to handle this is to put the read in a loop
and realloc the buffer as needed as long as the read continues to return
'>0'.

Ok.


It's obviously pretty racy to get the size of the file and then expect that
you'll be able to read in exactly that many bytes.

ACK.


Revised patch attached. I'm wondering, tho, about the advisability of using alloca'ed (rather than malloc'ed) memory to hold the contents of a file of unrestricted size. Aren't there limits on the available space within a single stack frame? Does it make sense (is it legal) to alloca 40k or 50k or 500k? of memory?

Granted, most /var/lib/alternatives files are going to be fairly small (< 1k) but there's no guarantee of that...

--
Chuck


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