Re: [PATCH] Change lt_dlerror to return NULL instaed of "unknown error"

[Peter O'Gorman]

On Thursday, September 11, 2003, at 6:56 AM, Scott James Remnant wrote:

> [ Patch resubmitted -- ping! :-) ]
>
> This is the behaviour as described in the documentation.  Nothing I've
> found relies on the different behaviour in the implementation so this
> patch changes it to match the docs.
Hi Scott,

I was just about to use my shiny new commit bit on this, you are of 
course correct, ltdl should not return LT_DLSTRERROR (UNKNOWN) even if 
there were no error.

However I realized that it was probably added because there are likely 
places in the code where an error occurs but the error string is not 
set. In this case returning NULL from lt_dlerror is also incorrect. I 
am not about to look through the code looking for places where this 
happens (it might not even happen as far as I know), but I suggest you 
modify your patch so that if lt_dlopen, lt_dlsym lt_dlclose are 
returning failure and the error has not been set then set the unknown 
error.

Thanks,
Peter

Note: I consider it an error in the application to use dlerror 
returning NULL as a test for a successful call to dlopen_dlsym or 
dlclose, these functions all return NULL or -1 in the event of failure, 
the return codes should be investigated rather than testing dlerror().