Re: [libvirt] [PATCH 03/18] Introduce a virFileDeleteTree method

On 04/08/2013 08:04 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote: Oh right. The gnulib wrappers are nice on Linux (even with older kernels, they fall back to /proc/self/fd usage for avoidance of quadratic behavior and no thread-safety issues); but on other platforms (hello mingw and older BSD), it uses chdir() under the hood, which is not thread-safe since the current working directory is global state. Also, the gnulib wrappers currently can call exit() on some extreme corner cases (primarily related to traversing through searchable but unreadable directories), and library code should not call exit(), so the modules were left GPL to avoid using them in a library until someone is motivated enough to clean up the code to be a bit more robust. I can make the argument for relaxing its license, if we really want it. Given that it is an essential function, and provided by libc (where glibc is LGPLv2+), I have typically had success with requests like that in the past; but it's not worth fighting the battle unless we know we want to use it. Yeah, that's a pretty convincing argument to use what you have here. But at least add a comment at the function declaration that we know the behavior is not optimal and should therefore not be used on deep hierarchies (where the quadratic behavior would definitely be noticeable). -- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org