BZ #1190: stream behaviour on encountering an EOF

[Paul Eggert]

On 09/13/2012 12:05 PM, Rich Felker wrote:
> the only applications that can see the difference
> are applications reading input from a terminal

No, it can affect applications reading from a socket,
or from various special devices.  It can even affect
an application reading from a regular file, if the file
happens to be growing.

> it's not something that affects major applications

Most major applications work in both traditional and
in C99ish environments, so they should work
regardless of whether EOF is sticky.  So in that sense,
yes, I expect this change should not break most major
applications.  But I wouldn't be surprised if it did
break "minor" (GNU-only) applications.  And anyway
the argument "it won't break anything" cuts both ways --
if applications really don't care whether EOF is sticky,
why should C99 insist on sticky-EOF and why should glibc
change?

> the reluctance to fix it seems to be purely the conservative
> maintainership philosophy lingering from the Drepper era

Surely it would be better to keep this discussion technical
rather than have it jump into the political arena.  Don't
we already have enough politics in our lives?