Re: Fwd: Re: error.c: "Unknown system error" should report errno value

[Martin Koeppe]

Hi Eric,

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Eric Blake wrote:

> Martin, [offlist]
>
> I don't know if you saw this when the discussion migrated to gnulib, but

I didn't, thank you.

> rather than patching error.c, I went with the option of fixing Interix's
> non-POSIX strerror instead (C99 and POSIX require strerror to always
> return non-NULL, even on failure).  Perhaps you can give it a spin, since
> I don't have an Interix environment set up?

Wait with the change! I just tested strerror() and strerror_r() on 
Interix, and they already report "Unknown error: 4294967294" for e.g. 
-2. Sorry.

I saw the not resolved errno only in a very special case, i.e. when 
running make in a chroot, and that make calls rm which open()'s a dir, 
not always, but I can reproduce it. It e.g. stops when building the 
coreutils man pages with /bin/rm being the just built rm. The open() 
fails in this case with errno=-1, while it should report an useful 
error if it fails. But it should have no reason to fail here. Then 
strerror() also fails. -1 isn't a documented errno value for open().

Everything is fine when running in the chroot without make, or with 
make and outside a chroot, so strerror() isn't tested here. (Same 
behaviour I got now with "sed -i" on opening the temp file within the 
chroot.)

While trying to debug this I noticed the missing translation from 
errno -1. But I now think it is probably a memory corruption issue or 
something like that, so that strerror()/strerror_r() gets confused, 
too.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

OTOH, rm from coreutils 5.97 works on Interix, while the current 
6.10pre doesn't. I'm still investigating...

BTW: Interix has locales. While I build on 3.5 and never saw nor cared 
about locales (but always built with libintl/libiconv), I saw on 5.2 
(2003R2) suddenly translated messages from the binaries I built before 
for 3.5.

And yes, I'll of course try a new coreutils/gnulib version (but I 
think in this case I shouldn't yet). Are there any coreutils snapshot 
.tar.gz available?


Martin