Re: libintl.h warnings with -Wundef

[Paul Eggert]

Marc Espie <address@hidden> writes:

> Why do othe projects use it on various software ?

I originally helped add the -Wundef support to GCC many years ago.  I
vaguely recall that it was in response to a request from another
project that used a style where it was useful.  It wasn't for any GNU
project.

> I really don't see any downside to it.

I do: it bloats the code and makes the code harder to read and
maintain, which in turn increases the probability of errors.  This is
a direct cost, and it is nontrivial.  I wouldn't advocate the use of
expressions like "defined __APPLE_CC__ && __APPLE_CC__ > 1" in code
that I helped to maintain.

> So this is not about fixing technical issues, it's just a political
> agenda and you don't like us.

The opposition to the OpenBSD-style deprecation of strcpy is not
political: it's technical.  The GNU approach avoids having arbitrary
limits on buffer size, and in this approach, primitives like strlcpy
are avoided.  There are important techical advantages of the GNU
approach.  There are disadvantages as well, but we feel the advantages
outweigh the disadvantages.  (Lead OpenBSD developers disagree, of
course.)

There are of course differences in politics between the two projects,
particularly with respect to licensing issues, but the strlcpy issue
has nothing to do with the politics.  It would help collaboration if
we didn't confuse the political with the technical issues.