Re: NSProcessInfo kernel dependency

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Tuesday, January 14, 2003, at 11:36  pm, James Knight wrote:

> NSProcessInfo seems to have a gratuitous dependance on the particular 
> kernel version in use. In particular, in +load, it attempts to count 
> the number of arguments from the file in /proc. However, some versions 
> of the kernel null terminate the last argument, and some don't. 
> Currently, gnustep handles this by using a configure check to 
> determine which kind of kernel you're on. That is less than ideal 
> situation, because 1) it is easy to do the check at runtime,

Unfortunately, this is not the case ...
Your code looks very much like the initial version I did to try to deal 
with this problem, and it suffers from the fact that it is in fact 
impossible to know whether you have a nul terminated list of arguments, 
or a non-terminated list whose final argument is an empty string.  This 
leads to very tricky to find problems  when people pass an empty 
argument to a program.

I guess Ideally what we should be doing is checking the kernel version 
at runtime rather than at configure time ... but I didn't/don't know 
how to do that and chose a reasonably quick solution at the time.

> and 2) people can and do use the same binaries on different kernels.

Good point.  Definitely we should be checking kernel version at runtime 
.. unless there is some better method.