struct dirent question

[John Baldwin]

On Wednesday 16 August 2006 14:48, Eric Anderson wrote:
> On 08/16/06 13:45, Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> > At 11:31 AM -0500 8/16/06, Eric Anderson wrote:
> >> My point was, that either path you take (if BSD_VISIBLE is
> >> defined or not), you end up with d_name having a size of
> >> 255 + 1, so what's the point the having it at all?
> > 
> > To make it clear that d_name is tied to the exact value
> > of MAXNAMLEN (just in case that value ever changes), and
> > it does not just happen to be 255+1 bytes for some reason
> > that is completely unrelated to MAXNAMLEN.
> > 
> > So if some programmer is working with the d_name variable,
> > and *if* they actually look at this include file, then
> > they'll immediately realize that any checks that they make
> > should use MAXNAMLEN, and not hard-code in the 255 value.
> > 
> > That's my 2-cents worth, at least...
> > 
> 
> 
> Then shouldn't both be set to MAXNAMLEN?
> 
> Of course, it isn't a big deal, I'm just curious what I'm missing in the 
> reasoning for doing such a thing.

It's a hack because MAXNAMLEN isn't POSIX, so for the pure-POSIX case,
_BSD_VISIBLE isn't defined, so we hardcode the length.

-- 
John Baldwin