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Re: BZ #1190: stream behaviour on encountering an EOF
From: Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 15:05:01 -0400
> I really don't see any way that fixing this bug in glibc could break
> anything; the reluctance to fix it seems to be purely the conservative
> maintainership philosophy lingering from the Drepper era, whereby
> fixing bugs was not allowed on the theory that some application might
> depend on the bug.
FWIW, I agree completely with Rich's impression.
And it's kind of ironic because even such judgments were never handed
out consistently. Consider the whole overlapping memcpy() debacle as
the most notable example. It was OK in that situation to knowingly
and provably break applications for the sake of what amounted to an
optimization.
But we can't risk deeply theoretical application breakage in order to
achieve conformance and fix a bug?