This is the mail archive of the libc-alpha@sourceware.org mailing list for the glibc project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: strxfrm output stability


Florian Weimer wrote:
I don't see this documented anywhere

Exactly. Because the behavior is undocumented, applications cannot rely on strxfrm calls being stable from one process to the next.

The manual suggests to store the strxfrm output and use it for sorting.
 I expect that some applications put it into on-disk database indexes as
a result.  This will lead to subtle breakage on glibc updates.

I'll go out on a limb and say that no sane application uses strxfrm, either on disk or off. As far as I can tell, strxfrm is an invention of the C standardization committee and is useless in real-world applications. So as a practical matter it is not a big deal as to how stable it is.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]