On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 1:57 PM, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Wed, 14 Jan 2009, Michael Kerrisk wrote: >> >> It has zero downside for *us*. But it is yet another example of Linux >> littering the Unix landscape with unnecessary inconsistencies that >> application writers must deal with. > > Bah. Not so. It matters not at all if you try to write portable code. > > Linux has extensions. This a behavior that was unintended by the implementer, wasn't requested by application writers, isn't present on other Unix systems, and isn't specified by the standards. It isn't an extension. It's an accident. And the fact that such accidents happen more often than necessary is the real problem, rather than the fact that this API in particular is inconsistent with expectations. > Deal with it. We have literally _thousands_ of > things that work on Linux but not on other OS's. The fact is, you can't > just recompile and assume something works, and waitid() has absolutely > nothing to do with it. > >> Well, POSIX.1-2001 is fairly clear: >> >> The application shall ensure that the infop argument points to >> a siginfo_t structure. > > Right. So the application should do that, and Linux does the right thing. > Problem solved. Right. And this fact is why, while I incline to think we should fix the interface, I don't feel strongly about it. Cheers, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git man-pages online: http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/online_pages.html Found a bug? http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/reporting_bugs.html -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-man" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
