Re: gnulib largefile support

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Bruno,

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> skribis:

> You are confusing trigger and cause. While a gnulib update *triggered*
> a malfunction [1], the *cause* was a guile bug [2], and it was fixed in
> guile 2.0 already two years ago [3].

I agree about the cause being a Guile bug.

That said, if the change to _FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 in GnuTLS wasn’t
explicitly asked for by the GnuTLS developers and just came up as part
of a routine Gnulib update, I find it quite confusing.  GnuTLS users may
find that the ABI silently changed.

> Ludo, I find that your fix in [4] is not optimal.

(The fix was about aforementioned bug, not about providing large file
support, which is orthogonal.)

> While testing whether guile was built to support large files or not
> (via GUILE_USE_64_CALLS) certainly fixes the problem at hand, it does
> nothing about the real problem. Namely, that guile will not work right
> with files > 2 GB.  The fix is to import the 'largefile' module from
> gnulib.

Yes, I think that’s what Guile should do.

Now, I’m not sure if it should be done in a stable series, since it
would change the ABI for users who just “keep the defaults”.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Ludo’.