I have a fairly urgent question (since release reliability might be affected) for Maurice (or anyone else who feels they might have a chance to understand plLibOpen) at the end. This question came up as a natural outgrowth of my setlocale investigations which I am reporting here for everybody.
While waiting for the release I am still trying to figure out a solid way to restore locale, but I am running into some really strange results. The recommended method of saving and restoring locale is the following (see http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/educationtutorial/creference/locale/locale.html): /* Save original locale name */ char * locale_string_ptr=setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, NULL); ... do other specific setlocale commands, e.g., setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, "C"); /* Restore original locale using original locale name. */ setlocale(LC_NUMERIC, locale_string_ptr); If I use the above idea in a simple test programme it works. However, valgrind reports invalid read errors for that final setlocale command so the Linux implementation is problematic and at minimum will add a lot of unacceptable noise to every single one of our valgrind reports. If I use the above in cmap0_palette_read to save and restore whatever the calling application uses for locale while using the "C" locale for the file read, it works the first time, but on the second time cmap0_palette_read is called, the string pointed to by locale_string_ptr is filled with garbage (probably because of the problematic implementation noted above) and as a result setlocale fails. I debugged this with gdb, and the library call that appears to generate the garbage is "fclose(fp);" in cmap0_palette_read. If I comment that out, then the logic succeeds, locale_string_ptr points to an empty string and the setlocale call that restores locale succeeds (although there are still a lot of serious valgrind errors reported for that call or if I simply output the string). Maurice (or somebody else here who understands the plLibOpen logic): could you review the plLibOpen logic and confirm it is correct to close a file opened that way with fclose? The plLibOpen logic has been sitting around as part of PLplot for ages, but it appears cmap0_palette_read and plspal1 are our first attempts to ever use that logic which is why it needs review by an expert (ideally before the release on Sunday). Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Let Crystal Reports handle the reporting - Free Crystal Reports 2008 30-Day trial. Simplify your report design, integration and deployment - and focus on what you do best, core application coding. Discover what's new with Crystal Reports now. http://p.sf.net/sfu/bobj-july _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
