> From: Jim Meyering <j...@meyering.net> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <e...@gnu.org>, bonz...@gnu.org, bug-grep@gnu.org > Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2011 11:37:59 +0100 > > I find the new semantics undesirable. > SAME_INODE as a boolean is easy to read. > When it becomes ternary, you have to handle the new possibility > of non-POSIX file systems. That is such a fundamental difference, > that it would require significant change to sensitive parts of > coreutils and gnulib. I really do not want to invest in supporting > such a platform when doing so will (at the very least) clutter up > already involved code with new bits to handle this unusual case.
Personally, I see no need for doing anything special about SAME_INODE on behalf of MS-Windows, and I don't really understand why Paul saw a need for a change. All that's needed is that SAME_INODE returns zero when both inodes are zero. Currently, this is done in src/main.c, but you can move this test to SAME_INODE, and be done. > Eventually no-inode systems will go away (in a way, they're already > gone), and when they are no longer worth supporting in grep I would > like to be able to remove any old support easily. Actually, there are no "no-inode systems" that I'm aware of. MS-Windows is not a "no-inode system". There _are_ inodes on Windows filesystems (e.g., you will see that Emacs on MS-Windows does provide an inode for each file and directory), it's just that the `stat' and `fstat' in the Microsoft libraries don't bother to produce them. However, it's quite doable to have a replacement `stat' and `fstat' (e.g., in gnulib) that will provide meaningful inodes on MS-Windows. The only difficulty with this is that the Windows inodes are 64-bit numbers, while sys/stat.h provided by MinGW and MSVC compilers uses a short int for st_inode. But since gnulib provides a replacement sys/stat.h as well, this problem is solvable. (No, I don't plan on working on this any time soon, but someone else might reuse the code we have in Emacs and do this.) When such a solution is available, the Windows build will "just work" in this regard. (And in case you are wondering, the MS-DOS build already has meaningful inodes, because the DJGPP library it uses implements `stat' and `fstat' that provide them.) Bottom line: just add a test against zero inodes to SAME_INODE, and be done. You can then remove the test in main.c for that, as a bonus.
