Re: gnulib largefile support

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> Well, I can imagine a small embedded system where files and
> streams cannot possibly be larger than 2 GiB.

Yes, such as my router here:

prompt> df
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/ram0                 4475      3487       988  78% /
/dev/mtdblock6             960       332       628  35% /configs
prompt> free  
              total         used         free       shared      buffers
  Mem:        59768        26140        33628            0          456
 Swap:            0            0            0
Total:        59768        26140        33628

But wait... This router has an USB port, where the user can plug USB disks
in Ext2 or FAT format, and the router will serve them via FTP. So, even
for this small Linux (it uses BusyBox) it makes sense to support files
larger than 2 GB.

> If this is a real issue, and if someone takes the time, I think
> it'd be OK to add small-file support to gnulib

This support already exists: the gnulib-tool option
--avoid=largefile. But really, I would not recommend this to anyone.

Bruno
-- 
In memoriam Hannah Szenes <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Szenes>