Re: [HACKERS] Platform status

Tatsuo Ishii <t-ishii@sra.co.jp>

From: t-ishii@sra.co.jp (Tatsuo Ishii)
To: "Thomas G. Lockhart" <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu>, Postgres Porting List <ports@postgreSQL.org>, Postgres Hackers List <hackers@postgreSQL.org>
Cc: t-ishii@sra.co.jp
Date: 1998-02-21T04:38:02Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
At  4:06 PM 98.2.19 +0000, Thomas G. Lockhart wrote:
>Here is my current list of supported platforms. The outstanding issues
>are:

>mklinux/ppc - still core dumping on regression tests? why??

I finally found the source of the problem. function "_readConst" in 
backend/nodes/readfuncs.c there is a line:

local_node->constlen = strtoul(token,NULL,10);

(before 6.3beta, this was:
local_node->constlen = atol(token);
)

For text type constant, token would be "-1." In this case
strtoul() of mklinux/ppc returns 0 not ULONG_MAX (same bit
pattern as -1). This is a problem. 
So quick workaround might be surrounding the line by #ifdef like:

#ifdef PPC
local_node->constlen = atol(token);
#else
local_node->constlen = strtoul(token,NULL,10);
#endif

P.S.
Sure current code works except MkLinux/ppc. However calling with
strtoul() with minus value is not well-mannered IMHO
(strtoul() returns error code ERANGE in this case).
To make matters worse, there are some codes that comparing
constlen and -1.
What about changing constlen to signed int and using
strtol() instead of strtoul() here?
Tatsuo Ishii
t-ishii@sra.co.jp