Mint library ramblings...

["Nicholas S Castellano" <entropy@terminator.rs.itd.umich.edu>]

Well, I hoped to get PL 32 out today but unfortunately I decided to
test it first :-).  I fixed a few problems here and there...if I don't
collapse from exhaustion today i'll try to get it out tomorrow.

For testing I was compiling Eric's port of the GNU fileutils.  I
decided to try to figure out why cross-device mv's have never worked
correctly on my system.  It seems that the copy() routine it uses to
copy from one filesystem to the other does read()s and write()s with a
size of 8K, and this is what was causing it to have strange results.

Is it a known bug in earlier versions of GEMDOS that you can't
reliably Fwrite() more than about 1K at a time?  If so has it been
fixed?  Or is the problem elsewhere (ICD driver?  I think I had this
same problem under AHDI 3.01 as well.)

The consequences of these long writes can be anything from an address
error to a total system crash (usually with a spectacular amount of
trash dumped to the console).

Another unrelated problem (feature?) that I noticed is the library's
behavior of chown() on TOS partitions.  Currently it gives a -1
return, with errno indicating an invalid function.  My feeling is that
this is a bit too paranoid, and that it would be reasonable to return
success from chown() if Fchown() returns EINVFN.  Or is this just
asking for trouble?

cheers,
entropy