The value of *size is not relevant in case of failure, but it's
better not to copy garbage from the stack into it.
(The compiler cannot see through the syscall, so optimization
was not affected by the unspecified value).
open is handled specially because it is used from so many places, in
so many variants (2 or 3 arguments, setting errno or not, and
cancellable or not). trying to do it as a function would not only
increase bloat, but would also risk subtle breakage.
this is the first step towards supporting "new" archs where linux
lacks "old" syscalls.
it's not clear why I originally wrote O_NOFOLLOW into this; I suspect
the reason was with an aim of making the function more general for
mapping partially or fully untrusted files provided by the user.
however, the timezone code already precludes use of absolute or
relative pathnames in suid/sgid programs, and disallows .. in
pathnames which are relative to one of the system timezone locations,
so there is no threat of opening a symlink which is not trusted by
appropriate user. since some users may wish to put symbolic links in
the zoneinfo directories to alias timezones, it seems preferable to
allow this.
this commit has two major user-visible parts: zoneinfo-format time
zones are now supported, and overflow handling is intended to be
complete in the sense that all functions return a correct result if
and only if the result fits in the destination type, and otherwise
return an error. also, some noticable bugs in the way DST detection
and normalization worked have been fixed, and performance may be
better than before, but it has not been tested.
Szabolcs Nagy
Rich Felker