Re: Status of Mac OS/X ports of git and cogito?

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Sep 11, 2005, 18:07 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0509111100260.3242@g5.osdl.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vvf17tsoa.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Sun, 11 Sep 2005, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

> Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> writes:
> 
> > I have three fixes in my personal tree without which git refuses to 
> > compile:
> >
> > - daemon.c needs a define or typedef for socklen_t.
> 
> I still keep that patch around (the patch was end of July), but
> have not touched it only because I did not hear from you asking
> about its inclusion.

Side note: one simple solution for "socklen_t" is to just replace it with "int".

Any operating system where socklen_t is anything else than "int" is terminally broken. The people who introduced that typedef were confused, and I actually had to argue with them that it was fundamentally wrong: there is no other valid type than "int" that makes sense for it.

In case anybody cares: not only is "int" obviously "big enough" even on some theoretical 16-bit architecture, so there's never any real _reason_ to use anything else.

But more importantly, the core BSD networking functions have historically had declarations like

	int accept(int s, struct sockaddr *addr, int *addrlen);

which means that if 'socklen_t' is ever anything else than "int", you'd break all old applications. For no good reason.

Ergo, any operating system that has socklen_t != int is so broken that it's simply not worth playing with.

(POSIX for a short while had _defined_ it to be the same as "size_t", I really had to scream at some people over it, and told people that Linux would never do anything that stupid. Apparently Linux was the first 64-bit operating system that people actually ever tried to use).

		Linus