[BusyBox] Boggling at tar.c a bit...

[Manuel Novoa III]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2005 at 11:39:59PM -0500, Rob Landley wrote:
> What does the #ifdef __gnuc__ bit do?

Looks like it wraps some code to try to prevent gcc from throwing
warnings about unused vars.

> We have a volatile local variable (vfork_exec_errno), which is interacting 
> with vfork in a way that seems unnecessarily subtle.  (Do parent and child 
> really reliably share a stack there?  Why did the threading people need 
> kernel support for thread local storage then?)

Of course they share a stack... the code is using vfork.  Apparently
they wanted the child code to pass back the errno value to the parent
on failure.  Since vfork_exec_errno is modified by the child in the 'if'
block and checked by the parent in the 'else' block, it needs to be
qualified as volatile.

Manuel