view tests/test-simplemerge.py.out @ 42562:97ada9b8d51b stable 5.0.2

posix: always seek to EOF when opening a file in append mode

Python 3 already does this, so skip it there.

Consider the program:

   #include <stdio.h>

   int main() {
     FILE *f = fopen("narf", "w");
     fprintf(f, "narf\n");
     fclose(f);

     f = fopen("narf", "a");
     printf("%ld\n", ftell(f));
     fprintf(f, "troz\n");
     printf("%ld\n", ftell(f));

     return 0;
   }

on macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux with glibc, this program prints

   5
   10

but on musl libc (Alpine Linux and probably others) this prints

   0
   10

By my reading of
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fopen.html
this is technically correct, specifically:

> Opening a file with append mode (a as the first character in the
> mode argument) shall cause all subsequent writes to the file to be
> forced to the then current end-of-file, regardless of intervening
> calls to fseek().

in other words, the file position doesn't really matter in append-mode
files, and we can't depend on it being at all meaningful unless we
perform a seek() before tell() after open(..., 'a'). Experimentally
after a .write() we can do a .tell() and it'll always be reasonable,
but I'm unclear from reading the specification if that's a smart thing
to rely on. This matches what we do on Windows and what Python 3 does
for free, so let's just be consistent. Thanks to Yuya for the idea.

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Ran 16 tests in 0.000s

OK