Date: Wed, 26 Mar 1997 13:01:41 +0300 (IDT)
From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
To: Teun Burgers <burgers AT ecn DOT nl>
cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, Marc Singer <elf AT netcom DOT com>
Subject: Re: ANNOUNCE: RCS version 5.7, patch 13
In-Reply-To: <9703251203.AA16673@joost.ecn.nl>
Message-ID: <Pine.SUN.3.91.970326125935.6618A-100000@is>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Teun Burgers wrote:


> On the networked drive (in this case a DEC-ultrix file system mounted by
> DEC pathworks) rename fails if the target file already exists.

So it's a libc bug after all.

Can we please have such bugs reported here, rather than worked around
in the application code?  There should be no reason for such
work-arounds in the case of DJGPP, since the sources for everything
are freely available.  The whole point of free software is that
correcting library bugs and sharing the information about them is much
easier than with proprietary libraries, where you depend on the good
will of the vendor.  Instead of introducing work-arounds for what
seems to be mysterious failures, let us fix them, so others won't need
to stumble upon them in the future.  

Since I don't have access to the particular configuration where the
bug happens, I need to ask you to investigate this further, in order
to understand the reason for this failure.  Please try this test
program and tell if it works in that case:

#include <stdio.h>
main (int argc, char **argv){
        printf("renaming %s to %s\n",argv[1],argv[2]);
        printf("return code: %d\n",_rename(argv[1],argv[2]));
}

(note that I used `_rename' rather than `rename').

In future, when you see such bugs, please don't silently work around
them.  If you can get the sources, debug the problem and suggest a
patch, fine; if you can't, at least report the problem and describe
how it can be reproduced so others will know about the bug and fix it
when they have time.