Re: new coreutils snapshot

[Martin Koeppe]

Hi Paul,

On Wed, 24 Oct 2007, Paul Eggert wrote:

> Martin Koeppe <address@hidden> writes:
> > Ok, download is possible now. But seq is still wrong for me. Either
> > include the gnulib printf-posix module, or change seq to use
> > asprintf() instead of printf() to fix. See the previous mails on that
> > by Bruno and me.
>
> Can you please clarify?  What I see from previous emails is this:
>
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00121.html
>
> This refers to some private correspondence, but it's not exactly clear
> to me what the bug is, or why adding printf-posix will fix it.
>
> Ordinarily we'd rather use printf than using aprintf and then sending
> the result to stdout; that way we don't need to worry about
> memory-allocation issues.

seq uses long double output, which doesn't work on some platforms. So 
it's necessary to use a replacement *printf() on these. The relevant 
functions are asprintf() and printf(). As seq uses asprintf() anyway, 
one could replace printf() with asprintf() and have only asprintf() to 
replace on these long double failing systems, but I see the malloc() 
disadvantage.

This has been discussed here, and as a result of the discussion the 
vasprintf-posix module has been added, which was insufficient however:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00033.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00068.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00082.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00083.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00084.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00121.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00122.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00123.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gnulib/2007-10/msg00124.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00121.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00122.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-coreutils/2007-10/msg00123.html

Unfortunately, the thread had several topics, as they all came up when 
I tried to build coreutils on Interix. In the listing above, I only 
mentioned the mails relevant to seq, however.


Martin