Re: [patch] work around ClearCase bug

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at airs dot com>]

Zack Weinberg <zack@codesourcery.com> writes:

> I'm doing some consulting work for Wind River.  They use ClearCase
> extensively.  It has a bug where close(2) will report failure with
> errno == EROFS for any file opened in a read-only "view" of the
> repository, even if the file was opened O_RDONLY.
> 
> Most Unix utilities ignore error returns from close for files opened
> for reading, but BFD doesn't.  Therefore, if you have object files
> stored in a read-only ClearCase view, GNU ld will fail when asked to
> link them.
> 
> Fixing the ClearCase bug is not practical, so I'm submitting this
> workaround for BFD.  It simply ignores a failed fclose(3) if the BFD
> object was opened for reading and errno is EROFS.
> 
> Reactions?

I don't think GNU utilities should work around obvious bugs in a
proprietary product like ClearCase.  If this were not an obvious bug
in ClearCase, I think it would be OK.  If ClearCase were widely used,
I think it would be OK.  If ClearCase were free, I think it might be
OK (though we would probably just fix ClearCase).

You can fix this yourself--in fact, you already have.  I don't think
this fix should go into the GNU sources.

Ian