Re: gnulib broken on systems lacking fchdir

[Jim Meyering]

Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> To my knowledge, gettext does not depend on fchdir (as evidenced by the fact
> that it builds on mingw).  But coreutils, findutils, tar, and gzip all use
> gnulib directory traversal.

When I think of gnulib directory traversal, I think of its lib/fts.c.
I knew about findutils using fts, but didn't know about the other two.

So I took a look.
I see that gzip doesn't use anything like that.  It just rolls its own
and operates on full relative names.  But that's the way it should be,
since no one cares if gzip can't recursively compress or decompress a
hierarchy that's really deep or that contains very long names.  Here,
simple is better, since gzip has to be so portable.

Tar rolls its own, too, but uses chdir, so doesn't hit the PATH_MAX
limitation.