Today, I've attempted to build atf on a NetBSD 4.0_BETA2 system I've been setting up in a spare box I had around, as opposed to the Mac OS X system I'm using for daily development. The build failed due to some well-understood problems, but there was an annoying one with respect to some calls to the standard XPG basename(3) and dirname(3) functions.

According to the Mac OS X manual pages for those functions, they are supposed to take a const char * argument. However, the NetBSD versions of these functions take a plain char * parameter instead — i.e., not a constant pointer.

After Googling for some references and with advice from joerg@, I got the answer: it turns out that the XPG versions¹ of basename and dirname can modify the input string by trimming trailing directory separators (even though the current implementation in NetBSD does not do that). This makes no sense to me, but it's what the XPG4.2 and POSIX.1 standards specify.

I've resolved this issue by simply re-implementing basename and dirname (which I wanted to do anyway), making my own versions take and return constant strings. And to make things safer, I've added a check to the configure script that verifies if the basename and dirname implementations take a constant pointer and, in that (incorrect) case, use the standard functions to sanity-check the results of my own by means of an assertion.

¹ How not, the GNU libc library provides its own variations of basename and dirname. However, including libgen.h forces the usage of the XPG versions.