Re: PATCH: Fix __WORDSIZE for ia64.

["H. J. Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 01:36:29PM -0500, Mark Brown wrote:
> > I am inclined to agree with this conclusion (the same one made on other
> > 64/32 platforms).  But it's not a change you just slip in without 
> comment,
> > discussion with users and system maintainers, and approval from the
> > architecture's canonical maintainer.
> 
> I can provide a little insight here, as we hit the same issue when
> AIX went towards 64bit. There are a surprising (at least to us at the 
> time)
> number of tools and applications that read utmp/wtmp. Some of them were
> user apps that really had no overriding reason, but all the same we took 
> some
> dings during the change. Not that the change can be avoided, but it is 
> probably
> a Good Thing to advertise this about a bit before doing it.
> 

Reading utmp/wtmp is not a problem if it is done via the interface
provided by libc. The issues are accessing them direcly bypassing libc
or programs are static.

Linux/ia64 is supposed to support unmodified ia32 programs. We missed
the utmp/wtmp issue. Now we are paying the price.


H.J.