Re: Why fixing 9533 doesn't fix 7744: revealed!

[Paolo Carlini <pcarlini at unitus dot it>]

Nathan Myers wrote:

> The call to xsgetn is at the wrong level of abstraction.  It keeps
> trying until it gets n characters, or EOF.  You want to call ::read()
> in underflow(), and just go with as many characters as it returns.
> (If it returns -1 and errno is EINTR you would call it again.)
> Then, get rid of that isatty()!
Ok (too bad that I learned how to use some autoconf machinery for
something which was not going to last much ;)

To be honest, at the time Loren envisaged using read (and, at the time
I didn't realy understand that :) but had also some perplexities:

>... POSIX IO. Someone skilled in the art could construct a
>well-performing implementation of __basic_file<char>::xsgetn() that
>could return short-reads [e.g. fread() (stdio) will only return a
>short-read on error or EOF whereas read() (POSIX) will short-read
>based on the current line discipline]. It is possible that this
>alternate implementation should only be used when
>ios::sync_with_stdio(false) was called (since the only portable way to
                                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>share stdio buffers is to make stdio calls).
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Do you believe I can go ahead and safely change the underlying
implementation of xsgetn to use read instead of fread?

Paolo.