Re: [bug-diffutils] Diffutils 3.2 v. VMS

[Paul Eggert]

On 10/09/2012 12:54 PM, Steven M. Schweda wrote:
> I was trying to fix a specific
> problem, and I don't know how many other instances of open() would be
> affected/damaged by a global change.

That depends on what the problem was.  I don't know VMS.
But if the problem affects one instance of open with
those flags, why wouldn't it affect them all?

>    This change is specific to the use of P_tmpdir (defined in <stdio.h>
> around here),

Why not just fix P_tmpdir directly, then?  That'd be simpler,
surely.  And it could be done in the stdio.h wrapper.

> sometimes it's nice to know what's going on
.
We want to insulate the mainline developers from having
to know what's going on in unusual ports.  Their life
is plenty complicated already.

> Resurrecting
> HAVE_WORKING_VFORK and its friends could allow hiding (or disguising)
> some of the VMS specificity, but not much.)

Why not?  What's the difference between VMS vfork and
(say) GNU/Linux vfork?  I'd rather resurrect that code,
if VMS could be abstracted away, than to have code that's
VMS-only vfork.