Is 6.3 ready for release?

[Bryan Kadzban]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: RIPEMD160

Dan Nicholson wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 04:04:17PM -0400, Bryan Kadzban wrote:
>> (if normal "read(0, ...);" works, why doesn't "test -r <that
>> device>"?)
> 
> Why do you think read(0,...) works?

I assumed that the normal C-program method for reading standard input
(that is, fgets(..., stdin);) was equivalent to read(0, ...);, with the
addition of possible line buffering.  Perhaps it isn't?  Let me do some
testing...

OK, testing shows that calling read(0, ...); works, even when /dev/stdin
"test"s not readable.  The program I used is attached.  I su'ed to root,
then to another nonprivileged user, then ran "[ -r /dev/stdin ] ; echo
$?" and got 1.  Then I ran this program, and it echo'ed my input, so its
read succeeded.

> I don't see anything in the tests that tries to read from stdin.

Right, it doesn't actually try to perform the read (if it did, then that
would be a better test of what I think it's trying to look for).  It
just looks to see whether /dev/stdin's permissions mask (which it gets
from stat) allows reading.  IMO that check is a poor one -- it should
just try to do the read, because there are cases where the test will
fail but reading is still possible.

> An alternative to using /dev/null is to use /dev/tty. This is what's
> done in the perl tests (not by us), but I guess we can't guarantee
> that'll be readable either.

Well, /dev/tty is "the process's controlling TTY", and its permissions
(AFAIK) should always be 0666.  So that sounds like it might work better
too.

On your patch:  Looks fine to me, unless we want to use /dev/tty.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFGt8W+S5vET1Wea5wRAxLPAJ944U6ypnq/szhHbORXzwplyV10HwCdHNzy
n9AUy3lIebsKc2w3Hl3COVU=
=570e
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: readtest.c
Url: http://linuxfromscratch.org/pipermail/lfs-dev/attachments/20070806/960e40c0/attachment.c