Re: CVS tip problems

Oliver Elphick <olly(at)lfix(dot)co(dot)uk> writes:
> On Mon, 2004-05-31 at 19:55, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I can't duplicate that here. It looks to me like the probable
>> explanation is a broken or incompatible version of strerror_r() on your
>> machine. Does the failure go away if you build without thread-safety?

> Yes it does.
> I'll see if I can run with a debugging libc and find it.

First you might want to check which flavor of strerror_r() your platform
has --- does it return int or char* ? The Linux man page for
strerror_r() says

strerror_r() with prototype as given above is specified by SUSv3, and
was in use under Digital Unix and HP Unix. An incompatible function,
with prototype

char *strerror_r(int errnum, char *buf, size_t n);

is a GNU extension used by glibc (since 2.0), and must be regarded as
obsolete in view of SUSv3. The GNU version may, but need not, use the
user-supplied buffer. If it does, the result may be truncated in case
the supplied buffer is too small. The result is always NUL-terminated.

The code we have appears to assume that the result will always be placed
in the user-supplied buffer, which is apparently NOT what the glibc
version does.

regards, tom lane