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Re: Problems with evolving feature test macros?
- From: "Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk dot manpages at gmail dot com>
- To: Paul Eggert <eggert at cs dot ucla dot edu>
- Cc: "libc-alpha at sourceware dot org" <libc-alpha at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 17:33:03 +0100
- Subject: Re: Problems with evolving feature test macros?
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <CAKgNAki3SzAN8rZjvMQxbqDkpRGBzsmNGBKMJ0DDcMAG0nG8gQ at mail dot gmail dot com> <531F34C8 dot 9000500 at cs dot ucla dot edu>
- Reply-to: mtk dot manpages at gmail dot com
Paul,
On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 5:07 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> On 03/11/2014 07:44 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>>
>> I'm guessing programmers will reach for
>> the only hammer that does not cause a compiler warning on any glibc
>> version:
>>
>> #define _GNU_SOURCE
>
>
> That's what most application developers should do, who run into this
> problem. There's even an Autoconf macro for it: AC_USE_SYSTEM_EXTENSIONS.
>
>
>> That seems to be a very unfortunate situation.
Really? I could imagine it to be a source of quite some pain for
programmers trying to write portable code, although I have no specific
examples to cite. The point here is that programmer's are trying to
write applications that are not Linux-specific, but are forced to
define a macro that says give me everything, including all of the
Linux and GNU specific stuff. That weakens the whole idea of having a
range FTMs (as opposed to just _GNU_SOURCE, say), it seems to me.
Cheers,
Michael
--
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/