On Sun, Oct 03, 2010 at 12:49:32AM +0200, Alan Barrett wrote: > I suggest a BUGS section in putenv(3) stating that that the interface > uses non-const char* for compatibility with POSIX brain damage, but the > implementation guarantees to treat it as read-only.
There is not such guarantee really. Strings in the environment should be writable. But in the past programs got away under NetBSD with adding non-writable strings. If the program afterwards behaved "nicely" e.g. by not writing to a pointer return by getenv(3) there wasn't a problem. All I wanted to do is restore that behaviour. I'm not sure whether it is good idea to document that we tolerate it. Kind regards -- Matthias Scheler http://zhadum.org.uk/