Re: [patch]lib/savewd working on OpenVMS

[Paul Eggert]

On 07/03/2017 04:45 PM, John E. Malmberg wrote:
> Those constrains are something that I will need to find out when I get 
> to running tests on the compiled modules.
>
> With vfork() on OpenVMS, all local automatic variables, even those 
> with a volatile-qualified type, can have indeterminate values if they 
> are modified between the call to vfork() and the corresponding call to 
> an exec routine.
>
> The OpenVMS C run-time library does not document what happens if you 
> make a second call to vfork() with out calling an exec function.

All that is fine, but savewd.h needs to document these constraints from 
the point of view of the callers of savewd_chdir and savewd_restore, not 
from the point of view of someone who knows implementation details. 
Callers should not even need to know that vfork might be used.

> The above change savewd.c is what I made to the module to get the 
> coreutils package building and running, along with adding quite a bit 
> of OpenVMS specific code to handle other portability issues.

Yes, but the idea is that the savewd.c change should be documented.