On 12/02/2020 08:27, Rich Felker wrote:
> Note that this patch has multiple problems which is why it's not
> upstream: unbounded vla, inconsistency of not supporting the shell
> behavior in execvpe (nonstandard extension, but should behave
> analogously), and redundant code in execlp (execvp, which it's
> calling, is already doing the fallback). I'm not sure what the right
> fix is. These functions are supposed to be safe to use from a vforked
> child, so allocation is kinda out of the question, at least not
> without some heavy machinery to prevent a leak in the parent's address
> space. I'd welcome ideas for a real fix.
> 
> Rich
> 


Indeed, the patch is not ideal.  It was simply the fastest way to ensure
conformance with this behaviour, which was important for reasons that
are lost to the sands of time.  (I no longer have any recollection of
which package was demanding this behaviour.)

Best,
--arw

-- 
A. Wilcox (awilfox)
Project Lead, Adélie Linux
https://www.adelielinux.org