Re: diffutils 2.8.1 ISO C90 compliance patch

[Paul Eggert]

"Paul Edwards" <address@hidden> writes:

> You can say the same about any other non-standard file.

No, <sys/types.h> is an ISO-standard file, as I already explained.
You may not like the choice of standard, which is your privilege; but
it's misleading to claim that <sys/types.h> is nonstandard.

> There is no reason to make text processing programs require Posix.

Sure there is, in many cases, one of them being diff3.  On POSIX-like
systems, diff3 is far more useful written the way that it is, than it
would be if it were written the way you suggested, where the user
would have to awkwardly plug in the output of two diffs by hand.

> It has not been written to cater for non-Posix systems.

Catering to such systems is not a goal of the GNU project.  See
<http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/System-Portability.html#System-Portability>,
which says (among other things) "As for systems that are not like
Unix, such as MSDOS, Windows, VMS, MVS, and older Macintosh systems,
supporting them is often a lot of work. When that is the case, it is
better to spend your time adding features that will be useful on GNU
and GNU/Linux, rather than on supporting other incompatible systems."