From: Miod Vallat (miodonline.fr)
Date: Sat Dec 01 2007 - 16:23:53 CST

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> Hi Marc, this might be a little off-topic, but I am still wondering
> what's the meaning of 'portable' here you are referring to. As we can
> see, most GNU systems (such as Linux distros) can be run on machines of
> many different architectures, so I suppose they are portable actually.
> How to define the word 'portable'? The code doesn't obey the standard is
> not portable?

There are several standards (with different degrees of braindeadness)
attempting to describe the expected behaviour of a Unix-like system:
Posix, Single Unix, XPG, etc.

Most systems (including OpenBSD) strive to match Posix and Single Unix.
The GNU C library found on most Linux systems also tries to match these
standards, but also adds a lot of GNU extensions (such as strfry() and
memfrob(), among other useless things).

Having strlen return zero for an argument of NULL, instead of causing a
segmentation fault, is one of them.

Since it is a GNU extension, code supposed to be able to run on systems
which do not have a GNU C Library (such as Solaris or MacOS X) can not
rely on it.

Miod

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