Re: [RFC v1] man/man2/close.2: CAVEATS: Document divergence from POSIX.1-2024

On Fri, May 16, 2025 at 04:39:57PM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:

On 2025-05-16 09:05:47 -0400, Rich Felker wrote:

quoted

FWIW musl adopted the EINPROGRESS as soon as we were made aware of the
issue, and later changed it to returning 0 since applications
(particularly, any written prior to this interpretation) are prone to
interpret EINPROGRESS as an error condition rather than success and
possibly misinterpret it as meaning the fd is still open and valid to
pass to close again.

If I understand correctly, this is a poor choice. POSIX.1-2024 says:

ERRORS
  The close() and posix_close() functions shall fail if:
[...]
  [EINPROGRESS]
    The function was interrupted by a signal and fildes was closed
    but the close operation is continuing asynchronously.

But this does not mean that the asynchronous close operation will
succeed.

There are no asynchronous behaviors specified for there to be a
conformance distinction here. The only observable behaviors happen
instantly, mainly the release of the file descriptor and the process's
handle on the underlying resource. Abstractly, there is no async
operation that could succeed or fail.

So the application could incorrectly deduce that the close operation
was done without any error.

This deduction is correct, not incorrect. Rather, failing with
EINPROGRESS would make the application incorrectly deduce that there
might be some error it missed (even if it's aware of the new error
code), and absolutely does make all existing applications written
prior to the new text in POSIX 2024 unable to determine if the fd was
even released and needs to be passed to close again or not.

Rich