gcc 3.4.4 cast warnings?

[Oskar Liljeblad]

A user of an application of mine claims that gcc 3.4.4 refuses to
compile statements like this one from dirname.c:

  char *dir = xmalloc (length + append_dot + 1);

or that it warned about it unless you change it to 

  char *dir = (char *) xmalloc (length + append_dot + 1);

This happened with gcc 3.4.4 on FreeBSD, but I can't reproduce it with
gcc 3.3.6 and gcc 4.0.1 on Debian i686 and amd64.
Does anyone know more about this?

Regards,

Oskar Liljeblad (address@hidden)