Re: bug: "fatal: cannot pread pack file", version 1.7.5.4

> On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 11:25:16AM +0700, Nguyen Thai Ngoc Duy wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jul 3, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
>> > On Tue, Jul 03, 2012 at 12:43:42AM +0200, Andreas Schwab wrote:
>> >
>> >> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:
>> >>
>> >> > It's very odd for pread to report ENOENT (since it is always operating
>> >> > on an already-opened file descriptor).
>> >>
>> >> It doesn't, but gettext will clobber errno:
>> >>
>> >>               n = pread(pack_fd, inbuf, n, from);
>> >>               if (n < 0)
>> >>                       die_errno(_("cannot pread pack file"));
>> >>
>> >> There is nothing that saves errno.  This isn't limited to i18n though,
>> >> any function call in the arguments may potentially clobber errno.
>> >
>> > That's horribly lame of gettext. I don't expect arbitrary functions to
>> > save errno, but when the entire purpose of a function is to be a
>> > non-intrusive wrapper to massage messages to the user, it seems kind of
>> > evil to overwrite errno. Isn't the whole point of calling it "_" that
>> > you don't want to or have to notice it?
>> 
>> Agreed.
>
> Hmm. According to gettext(3):
>
>   ERRORS
>          errno is not modified.
>
> And googling for "gettext" and "errno" reveals several bugfixes in GNU
> gettext to make sure that gettext preserves errno. I wonder if there are
> systems where that is not the case, though; I don't know what non-GNU
> gettext implementations are in common use these days. I'd still be
> curious to hear what platform the server is for this bug report.