[RFC] [PATCH] libltdl error reporting

[Peter O'Gorman]

Hi,

As I am sure many are aware, libltdl's error reporting is pretty dumb, 
lt_dlerror() regularly reports things like "file not found" where the 
actual problem might be something completely different, and a reasonable 
error string may be readily available from dlerror().

When I looked at the manual, and read the description for lt_dlerror() I 
saw "Return a human readable string describing the most recent error 
that occurred from any of libltdl's functions. Return NULL if no errors 
have occurred since initialization or since it was last called." and I 
thought "Well, that's stupid - that's not what dlerror() does". So, I 
went to see what POSIX says - it's also wrong - 
http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/dlerror.html, I 
will file a bug with them later.

At least glibc and Mac OS X reset the dlerror() string to NULL every 
time a dl*() api is called (I will check what other systems do in the 
next few days). This is so programmers can do:

 .....
 dlsym(handle, "foo");
 if ((err = dlerror()) != NULL) printf(stderr,"dlsym error: %s\n",err);
 ...

without dlerror() returning some other error that occurred long before 
the call to dlsym().

Unfortunately, it looks like libltdl attempts to save error state across 
calls to lt_*() functions, and generally does not do it well.

This patch resets the error every time a public ltdl function is called, 
and when setting an error tests if it is already set and doesn't 
overwrite it if it is. The fist error "wins".

The patch is fairly simple, and undoubtedly still imperfect, but test 
results are good, one test required a small patch to stop segfaulting, 
another should have unexpectedly passed, but doesn't, I think it is 
another error in the test, but haven't looked too closely yet.

If something like this does get in, I'd prefer to not change the libltld 
soname, I don't believe better error reporting will cause client 
applications to break. I could be wrong, of course :)

Patch attached (or course, a final patch will have to change the manual 
as well) - thoughts?

Peter

errors.patch
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