Re: at least 260 packages broken on arm, powerpc and s390 due to wrong assumption on char signedness
On 06-Jan-02, 04:55 (CST), Adrian Bunk <bunk@fs.tum.de> wrote:
>
> You need to do this in a portable way so that it works on every system...
No, the people who want modern code to run on their systems need to
figure out how to support the standard. Why should every piece of
code contain the work-arounds to support broken systems, rather than
expecting the systems to solve their own problems?
> It's the choice of the author of a program whether he wants to support
> older systems or not -
Exactly. It's not required, and shouldn't even be expected. I'd much
rather an author spent time adding features, or writing docs, or even
relaxing with Quake than waste it supporting the 1993 version of
Piece-o'-Crap OS. But that's my opinion, and if some one feels the need,
then that's up to them.
>I remember that e.g. many GNU programs still support
> pre-ANSI C compilers.
Which is really sad. It makes the code harder to read, and provides
ample opportunity for subtle bugs when the standard code path is
updated, and the non-standard one isn't. The only thing that really
needs to support pre-ansi compilers is gcc (and possibly GNU make).
Anyway, I suppose this is off-topic enough. The original point was that
most people don't even know how to write standard conforming code, much
less adjust for supporting systems that aren't.
Steve
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