Re: [clisp-list] mac os x socket problems and 2.38

[Doug P. <dg...@ma...>]

>clisp 2.37 has a bug on open :if-exists :append, so I want to release
>2.38 ASAP.

Cool!

>the only blocker is the mac os x socket bug.
>it has been reported that this bug was not present in 2.36, so the brute
>force "fill everything with 0" patch will NOT go in.

Sam,

I must strenuously object to this line of thinking. You cannot prove the bug did not exist because you cannot prove that the structure didn't just happen to have 0s in the right places by accident.

If you really want to prove that the 2.36 version was OK, you would have to assert that the structure's memory (not just the defined fields since padding is inaccessible from defined field access) was filled with something other than zeroes. Was it it 0xFF filled first?

I strongly urge you to put the fill everything with 0 patch IN. We know it works, and anyone who has done software for as long as I (and you, all of us: we) have should know that uninitialized variable bugs can hide for a long, long time. That this wasn't caught until now doesn't make Mac OS X any less buggy before, nor does it indicate that anything more ominous happened than random stack garbage change the uninitialized values of the structure.

--Doug