posix: always seek to EOF when opening a file in append mode Python 3 already does this, so skip it there. Consider the program: #include <stdio.h> int main() { FILE *f = fopen("narf", "w"); fprintf(f, "narf\n"); fclose(f); f = fopen("narf", "a"); printf("%ld\n", ftell(f)); fprintf(f, "troz\n"); printf("%ld\n", ftell(f)); return 0; } on macOS, FreeBSD, and Linux with glibc, this program prints 5 10 but on musl libc (Alpine Linux and probably others) this prints 0 10 By my reading of https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/009695399/functions/fopen.html this is technically correct, specifically: > Opening a file with append mode (a as the first character in the > mode argument) shall cause all subsequent writes to the file to be > forced to the then current end-of-file, regardless of intervening > calls to fseek(). in other words, the file position doesn't really matter in append-mode files, and we can't depend on it being at all meaningful unless we perform a seek() before tell() after open(..., 'a'). Experimentally after a .write() we can do a .tell() and it'll always be reasonable, but I'm unclear from reading the specification if that's a smart thing to rely on. This matches what we do on Windows and what Python 3 does for free, so let's just be consistent. Thanks to Yuya for the idea.

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  $ cat >> $HGRCPATH << EOF

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  > [ui]

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  > logtemplate="{rev}:{node|short} ({phase}) [{tags} {bookmarks}] {desc|firstline}\n"

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  > [extensions]

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  > dirstateparanoidcheck = $TESTDIR/../contrib/dirstatenonnormalcheck.py

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  > [experimental]

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  > nonnormalparanoidcheck = True

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  > [devel]

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  > all-warnings=True

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  > EOF

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  $ mkcommit() {

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  >    echo "$1" > "$1"

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  >    hg add "$1"

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  >    hg ci -m "add $1"

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  > }

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  $ hg init testrepo

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  $ cd testrepo

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  $ mkcommit a

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  $ mkcommit b

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  $ mkcommit c

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  $ hg status