Re: thread-safety: getpwuid_r()

On 24.08.24 15:55, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Come to think of it, the pg_get_user_name() function is just a thin
> wrapper around getpwuid_r(). It doesn't provide a lot of value. Perhaps
> we should remove pg_get_user_name() and pg_get_user_home_dir()
> altogether and call getpwuid_r() directly.

Yeah, that seems better. These functions are somewhat strangely
designed and as you described have faulty error handling. By calling
getpwuid_r() directly, we can handle the errors better and the code
becomes more transparent. (There used to be a lot more interesting
portability complications in that file, but those are long gone.)

I tried to be overly correct by using sysconf(_SC_GETPW_R_SIZE_MAX) to
get the buffer size, but that doesn't work on FreeBSD. All the OS where
I could find the source code internally use 1024 as the suggested buffer
size, so I just ended up hardcoding that. This should be no worse than
what the code is currently handling.