Re: [Bug-tar] ignore_value vs (void) [was: bug#15970: bug#15970: Crash in gettext() after fork() on Mac OS X]

[Charles Swiger]

On Nov 27, 2013, at 11:40 AM, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 11/27/2013 12:04 PM, Charles Swiger wrote:
>> With respect, folks who want to pull in gnulib for ignore_value() simply
>> in order to write portable ANSI-C code are far more likely to benefit from
>> Joerg's advice and experience in writing portable code-- code which does 
>> _not_
>> assume GCC & gnulib-- than they are likely to be correct about the relative
>> portability of code to non-GNU platforms which don't come with gnulib.
> 
> It sounds like you don't know what gnulib is (and are confusing it with
> glibc).  Gnulib is a library of SOURCE code, which is designed to
> compile on ANY platform with a C89 or better compiler.  It is not
> required to use gcc to do the compilation, nor to link with glibc.
> Gnulib is used in a large number of projects (some GNU, some not), and
> has been proven to be useful on systems that don't have any GNU software
> installed natively.

Thanks for the reply, and for Paul's as well, but that really is orthogonal
to the original point: using ignore_value() rather than a cast to void is a
GNUism which some folks seem to prefer in lieu of portable ANSI-C code.

That's readily apparent just from looking at:

http://github.com/gagern/gnulib/blob/master/lib/ignore-value.h

# if __GNUC__ < 3 || (__GNUC__ == 3 && __GNUC_MINOR__ < 4)

...which is testing for GCC 3.4 or later.

However, since we're on the topic and you appear to be one of the authors
of this code, Eric, would you agree with Paul that either ignore-value.h is
de minimus and not protectable under copyright, or would you be willing to
also place it under a permissive license like the 2-clause BSD or MIT/zlib
licenses rather than under GPLv3?

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck