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Re: Problems with evolving feature test macros?
- From: Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst dot de>
- To: Paul Eggert <eggert at cs dot ucla dot edu>
- Cc: libc-alpha at sourceware dot org
- Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2014 15:03:15 +0100
- Subject: Re: Problems with evolving feature test macros?
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <CAKgNAki3SzAN8rZjvMQxbqDkpRGBzsmNGBKMJ0DDcMAG0nG8gQ at mail dot gmail dot com> <531F3E8F dot 4070204 at cs dot ucla dot edu> <CAKgNAkiTBRwUuquUrf8pMSmbKGn11UxY=b85pzSq+PKKk9sq+w at mail dot gmail dot com> <9377251 dot S2YQ79AfuF at vapier> <CAKgNAkj+P69LCSO9xMNBbFW7FOy7v+DL5cAkat6dNRahfjMXOQ at mail dot gmail dot com> <5323159A dot 30208 at cs dot ucla dot edu>
On Fri, Mar 14, 2014 at 07:43:38AM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>> Paul appeared to be saying that FTMs are a complete waste of time,
>
> They're not a *complete* waste of time, as they're required for standards
> conformance. They're like trigraphs: they waste time only in the sense
> that they don't really help developers and they are a minor annoyance. The
> less we have of them the better, so tidying them up can be a win.
With my application developer hat on I see some use in them: if I want to
write a portable application having libc help me using only APIs provided in
a well defined standard is useful. Things like _BSD_SOURCE, _SVID_SOURCE
or _GNU_SOURCE aren't.