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gnulib


From: Reuben Thomas
Subject: gnulib
Date: Tue, 8 Mar 2011 22:50:06 +0000

Given the current rude health of gnulib, it seems like the GNU Coding
Standards' guidance on portability should be updated.

I note two main areas:

1. Section 5.7, and similar mentions re. GNU APIs: an excellent
first-line portability strategy is simply "use gnulib". This allows
one to write to POSIX-1.2001, or, to a lesser and harder-to-determine
extent, the subset of GNU which gnulib supports on non-GNU systems,
and gnulib picks up the slack. Of course, it's not bulletproof, but at
least for the POSIX case, you can assume it will work and sort out
problems as they arise (preferably by patching gnulib) rather than
have to worry about each case. Section 5.7 is basically out of date,
as much of the advice predates even C89 (and unless one is maintaining
pre-C89 code, one shouldn't be worrying about it now).

2. Section 5.6 says: "A simple way to use the Gnulib error module is
to obtain the two source files ‘error.c’ and ‘error.h’ from the Gnulib
library source code repository at
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git."; This should be
deleted. gnulib should be used via autotools, period (at least, any
other method doesn't need covering in the GNU coding standards).
Anything else is just asking for pain, and there's no reason for it.

Actually, much of section 5 could be thrown out and/or rewritten, but
absent someone with the time to do that, at least implementing the
above two suggestions would be a start. I'm willing to help with that.

-- 
http://rrt.sc3d.org



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