Re: [Dump-devel] dump and largefiles

[<ty...@va...>]

   Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 21:29:34 +0100
   From: Andrea Arcangeli <an...@su...>

   Please reject the above one liner (you had to reject it anyways :) becase also
   `dump` (not only restore) needs to be compiled with -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 so
   that the output file is opened with O_LARGEFILE (otherwise max dump output
   filesize is 2G). I really dislike having to change all open() to make them to
   use O_LARGEFILE... I much prefer the ./configure --enable-largefile way that
   just adds the -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 param all over the dump package (dump and
   restore) as discussed previously. That's safe and cleaner.

Shrug.  I suspect you only need to add the O_LARGEFILE flag in one place
for dump, and it makes resulting binary much more likely to be portable.

The question of which is cleaner is probably mostly a religious issue,
but I feel very trongly that it's a bad-bad-bad idea for libraries,
since it can end up changing the binary ABI of the library without any
kind of warning.  For programs, it's a matter of how much you trust
glibc to maintain the proper backwards compatibility.  YMMV.   So for
programs, it's probably more of a personal comfort issue of which you
think feels better to you.

						- Ted