On 03/24/18 19:57, Rich Felker wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 24, 2018 at 07:45:52PM -0500, A. Wilcox wrote:
>> This header and API are used by at least:
>>
>> - filelight (disk space usage tracker)
>>
>> - K3b (KDE disc ripper)
>>
>> - KDELibs 3.x, used by TDE (Trinity Desktop Environment, light Qt DE)
>>
>> - MythTV and XBMC (media center/players)
>>
>> - Pegasus (scientific computation management system by USC)


Add XFCE 4 to this list: their disk monitor panel plugin requires
<fstab.h> and does not test for it in configure since it is so widely
implemented (as below).


>> Since this is already implemented by glibc[1], FreeBSD[2], NetBSD[3],
>> OpenBSD[4], Mac OS X[5], AIX[6], HP-UX[7], QNX[8], and
>> others[9][10][11][12], all but TDE's fork of KDELibs 3 don't check for
>> it in configure.  I would be more than happy to implement and maintain this.
> 
> Seems plausible that it would be reasonable but I haven't looked at
> the specifics. How large would the implementation be? Are there ugly
> issues with thread-safety/global state that make the apis hard to use
> reasonably? Anything weird it has to hook into?


It's basically the /etc/fstab equivalent of <mntent.h>.  It has the same
considerations as <mntent.h>.  It's MT-unsafe and AS-unsafe because it
does the set/get/end ent stuff, just with /etc/fstab instead of
/etc/mtab (or /etc/passwd in the case of pwent, etc).

https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/fstab.html is the
glibc manual for it.

I will likely write a basic implementation up next week, and send it to
the list.

Best,
--arw


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