Hi,
>>  Is there a change that could be made to the NetBSD libraries that would
>> avoid this forever
>
>No.  The problem is that much software tries to get the error string for
>OS errors--to be more polite than "open config.file: error 2", it can say,
>"open config.file: No such file or directory."  Or something like that.

There is this neat function called strerror()... it's even in POSIX.
I propose to use that one (and supply one in a supplemental OS glue library
if it doesn't exist) instead of playing around with semi-documented
library variables.

I do _not_ think that defining sys_errlist in some header is helpful.

-- 
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