[Gdal-dev] VSIFOpenL/VSIFOpen question

[Eric Dönges]

Hi,

after spending about an hour or so debugging a heavily modified gdal  
driver that kept crashing in the OS's sseek function, I realized that  
my problem was that while VSIFOpenL
claims to return a FILE * (and all the related VSIFXXXL functions  
claim to expect FILE *),
what it returns is not really a FILE *. I think this is an absolutely  
horrid design
decision (and whoever thought it up should be thoroughly ashamed of  
themselves). Wouldn't
it be better to create a new type name for these functions, for  
instance VFILE (or VSIFILE
*)? That way, the compiler could warn naive programmers like me when  
I pass the wrong type
of file handle. Or am I missing something important here ?

With kind regards,
Eric

P.S.: I'm probably going to regret this, but I'll volunteer to do the  
necessary work to
fix this if the steering committee agrees that this needs to be fixed.