Re: New platform independent problem

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 08:29:20 -0500 (EST)
> From: Igor Peshansky <pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu>
> cc: djh <henman@it.to-be.co.jp>, emacs-devel@gnu.org, cygwin@cygwin.com
> 
> > > This break emac's dired.c (from compiling)
> > > Ref: http://www.cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2005-12/msg00205.html
> >
> > Without knowing the full details, I'd risk saying that this was not
> > the best decision.  Is there really no way of making d_ino be
> > consistent with what `stat' returns about the same directory?
> 
> Corinna already covered that.

Where?  I don't see anything from Corinna in the thread that followed
the above message.  (I don't read the Cygwin list.)

> Frankly, many programs expect that if d_ino is present, it has the correct
> value (i.e., the same as st_ino).

Which programs expect that, besides the two Chris mentioned?  My
experience is the other way around: that d_ino is rarely used.

> Having the member and not setting it correctly is essentially lying
> to the application.  Is it so bad for Cygwin to be honest?

What is bad is to have dirent.h, but not some of the struct members it
calls for.

> If the content of d_ino isn't required to be anything specific, a simpler
> solution could be something like
> 
> #ifdef __CYGWIN__
> #define d_ino __deprecated_d_ino
> #endif

It's bad mantra for an application to use a symbol that starts with
"__", since those symbols are reserved for the library implementation.

> Though why would a program refer to d_ino if it doesn't expect to do
> anything with its content is beyond me.

Emacs cares that d_ino is non-zero, meaning that this direntry is not
empty, but otherwise the value of d_ino is not important.