Re: 91-c++-exit-decl.patch

[Pavel Roskin]

Hello!

> You and Alexandre are good judges.  Please, I'm soon leaving, may
> I ask for a service?  Could you adjust the patch to what emerges from
> your debating, then snapshot 2.49c and put it on alpha, and send
> an announcement?  Don't hesitate removing the old betas.  And
> move configure.in to 2.49d.

I'm leaving too :-(

I'll be back on January 8. Not sure if I'll be able to do something from
Russia over a 21.6k modem until then.

> I understand this.  Nonetheless since we officially _try_ to
> support CC=cxx, it's not that surprising they are so alike, and
> will remain.  But sure, maybe someday this approach will be proved
> wrong.

My point was, we don't support CXX=cc. Anyway, we can apply your patch and
revert it later if it's needed.

> Pavel> That's not good. Every "configure" for pure C projects will
> Pavel> contain C++ tests. Support C++ compilers in the C mode is a
> Pavel> nice thing to have, but I doubt that it's really worth it when
> Pavel> it comes to such workarounds.
>
> Hm, I'm not sure I understand what you mean.  No AC_PROG_CXX or
> any other CXX macro will be triggered.  We onlly test whether
> the C compiler wants a proto for exit.  If you dislike the name
> which highlights the origin of this need, feel free to get rid
> of _CXX_.  I'd keep it though.

I see. So the price is not that high as I thought.

I still don't like that the macro is very specialized. Instead of checking
just for exit() it should probably check whether declarations are required
(by compiling be_damned_if_your_headers_declare_this();), and then check
for a header for the function from a given list. Something like this:

AC_LANG_STRICT_PROTOTYPE
if test x"$ac_[_AC_LANG_ABBREV]_strict_proto" = xyes; then
  AC_LANG_SEARCH_HEADER(exit, [stdlib.h, cstdlib])
fi

Regards,
Pavel Roskin