Re: AC_FUNC_STRTOD

[Russ Allbery]

Bruno Haible <address@hidden> writes:

> At this point, it would be a good idea to mark all AC_FUNC_* macros that
> request an AC_LIBOBJ replacement as obsolete and refer the user to Gnulib
> for both the macro and the workaround code (and the documentation).
> Except maybe AC_FUNC_MALLOC and AC_FUNC_REALLOC, because the replacement
> code for them is so trivial that anyone can make it up himself.
> The affected macros are:
>   - AC_FUNC_ERROR_AT_LINE
>   - AC_FUNC_GETLOADAVG
>   - AC_FUNC_LSTAT_FOLLOWS_SLASHED_SYMLINK
>   - AC_FUNC_MEMCMP
>   - AC_FUNC_MKTIME
>   - AC_FUNC_OBSTACK
>   - AC_FUNC_STAT, AC_FUNC_LSTAT
>   - AC_FUNC_STRTOD
>   - AC_FUNC_STRNLEN
>   - AC_REPLACE_FNMATCH

This seems like a reasonable plan to me, but if you do this, the one
additional request I have is to please retain somewhere in the Autoconf
documentation a mention that these functions have known portability
issues.  I think many people use the Autoconf manual as one input source
(of several) of information about functions that may need portability work
on platforms one doesn't have at hand when doing development, and I'd like
to not lose that information.

The one drawback of this is that this change will be frustrating for users
of the Autoconf macros who were providing their own replacement
implementations, since now they either have to write their own Autoconf
macros as well or have to deal with importing of Autoconf macros from
Gnulib, which is more complex than using macros that are part of Autoconf
(particularly in keeping them up-to-date).  I know that Gnulib has tools
for that for projects that use Gnulib completely, which is the primarly
Gnulib target audience, but that's some overhead for projects that were
never using Gnulib and now would be asked to use it just for one or two
Autoconf macros.

It may be that at this point selectively pulling things from Gnulib is so
easy that this is just a matter of documentation, but it's something to be
aware of.

-- 
Russ Allbery (address@hidden)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>