Re: errno --> errno name ?

[Bruce Korb]

Hi Bruno,

On 08/02/11 15:49, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Is the list of errno values meant to be extracted before a tarball is built, or
> at build time?

Build time -- the script needs to be made portable.
The included Makefile has a dependency.  I included it as an example.

> Also, what's the point of using the numeric values of the error numbers?
> If you generate code like

For human eyeball reference.  It's all in one place, instead of scattered about 
in
almost a dozen different files.

> then the code is not only more robust but also requires fewer relocations when
> put into a shared library. In
>
>      [  1] = "EPERM",
>      [  2] = "ENOENT",
>
> the shared library needs to relocate, during loading, as many pointers as there
> are references to strings.

It wasn't written for a shared library.  It was written and twiddled exclusively
for command line use.  Still, it isn't rocket science to either emit an array
of offsets into a string with embedded NUL bytes, or to emit the switch
statement you noted above.  The real deal with the code was a mechanism
for finding errno information by number, name or a regular expression searching
of the errno descriptions.

Cheers - Bruce