Re: New platform independent problem

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: address@hidden (Eric Blake)
> Cc: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 17:01:37 +0000
> 
> > You could have a flag that, if set, will instruct readdir to do the
> > expensive processing.  Applications that need the real inode will set
> > that flag.
> 
> And then we would have to change applications to call this nonstandard
> entry point at the beginning of their program to set the flag.

Not necessarily, you could do that in a static constructor in a
Cygwin-specific source file, far from the application's sources, which
will remain unpolluted.

> As long as we are editing programs, we might as well teach them to
> respect a sentinel of -1 without having to resort to adding a
> nonstandard entry point.

I don't see how this is better: -1 is an arbitrarily picked value,
with no relation to any standard.  Why should applications learn about
it?