[PATCHES] glibc 2.1, Linux, and chown

[Joel Klecker]

At 10:17 -0800 1998-12-12, Jim Pick wrote:
>The argument for not breaking compatibility is that the old chown
>behaviour was valid (it's undefined in the specs), and we shouldn't be
>breaking userspace applications.

Depends on which specs you mean. The Single Unix Specification (aka 
UNIX98) very clearly defines the behavior of chown.
For reference: 
< http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/chown.html > and 
< http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xsh/lchown.html >.

>It sounds like Debian has patched the other architectures to work with
>2.1.x as well.  Joel wants these merged in.  This is where it gets
>interesting, I think.

The Debian/m68k people asked a few months back for a chown patch 
based on the i386 kluge, which was rejected by the Debian maintainer 
because upstream would not accept it.
A similar patch for sparc was added to the debian/patches directory 
of the Debian glibc-pre2.1 source package (glibc 2.1 test releases or 
snapshots) which means Debian/sparc is using a patched glibc.
Debian/alpha is using a patched glibc as well.
--
Joel Klecker (aka Espy)                     <URL: http://web.espy.org/ >
<URL: mailto:jk@espy.org >                  <URL: mailto:espy@debian.org >
Debian GNU/Linux PowerPC -- <URL: http://www.debian.org/ports/powerpc/ >