[l2h] No such luck with "ndbm store returned -1, errno 22,key "" at... "

[Bruce R Miller]

Julius Smith wrote:

> Perhaps the Perl distributed with RH Linux 6.1 crashes on null hash keys,
> while earlier releases did not?  In any case, the above insert seems to
> functionar as a workaround.  Perhaps the fix should really be
> 
>     $global{$key}-- if ($key && $making_name);

I posted that same patch a month ago when a collegue ran into a similar
problem.  I suspect it didn't get responded to because it only happens
rarely (in the past?) and isn't clearly a l2h bug.

As near as I can understand it, some of the <x>dbm packages dont
guarantee
that using a null hash key is OK.  When you install perl from scratch,
it
will do tests to determine if it _can_ do that; so from perl's POV (and
presumably from l2h's POV too), null keys are OK.

What seems to have happened, is that the ndbm package in RH6.1 no longer
accepts the null key, but perl has been installed to have ignored the 
problem.... or something like that.

As far as l2h is concerned, that was also the place we encountered the 
problem, so that fixed it,  but there _could_ be other places where a 
null key is used!
--
bruce.miller@nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/