Re: at least 260 packages broken on arm, powerpc and s390 due to wrong assumption on char signedness
On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, Steve Greenland wrote:
> > If every system had up-to-date, standards-conforming
> > ctype.h support, we wouldn't have to worry much at all.
> > But even these days, pretty many systems with buggy macros
> > are still in use.
>
> Then fix those systems. Pull the necessary stuff out of glibc and use
> it rather than the system headers/libc.
You need to do this in a portable way so that it works on every system...
> > FYI, as far as I know, the most portable way to use
> > the ctype macros is to define wrapper macros
> > (e.g., like those below, from fileutils/src/sys2.h)
> > and then use only the wrappers (upper-case names) from your code.
>
> <rant>
> What an abomination. I spent way too much of my youth doing crap like
> this. I'm tired of it. The standard has been in place for 12 fscking
> years. If the vendors aren't going to support it, then those systems
> are dead. I've better things to do with my time than make ugly code to
> support systems that haven't been upgraded for over a decade.
> </rant>
It's the choice of the author of a program whether he wants to support
older systems or not - and if he wants to support older systems (and many
older systems are still running) or systems that don't confirm to a
standard he won't accept patches that limit the number of systems his
program runs on. I remember that e.g. many GNU programs still support
pre-ANSI C compilers.
> Steve
cu
Adrian
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