Re: argz whitespace

[Eric Blake]

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According to Bob Friesenhahn on 5/20/2008 10:14 AM:
| On Tue, 20 May 2008, Eric Blake wrote:
|> Also, would anyone be interested in a patch that renames argz_.h to
|> argz.in.h to match gnulib?  Gnulib recently changed to avoid _ in file
|> names where possible, and these days, platforms that don't handle two
|> . in
|> a file name are generally not worth porting to.
|> http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=gnulib.git;a=commitdiff;h=5155f7d
|
| Isn't one of those platforms versions of Microsoft Windows?

No.  All versions of Windows and porting platforms on top of Windows
(think mingw, cygwin, interix), and even, for that matter, FAT and NTFS
file system drives on Linux, support long file names (which implies
multiple dots).  It is only the old DOS 8.3 short file names that can't
handle double dots, but DJGPP has not been actively developed for several
years.

|
| What qualifies a platform as not being worth porting to?

It's somewhat subjective.  The gnulib mailing list has come up with an
ad-hoc definition of any platform released within the last 3-5 years, and
preferably where the vendor has not declared the platform end-of-life,
while also supporting older platforms where the vendor is still actively
providing support.  So, as an example, Solaris 4 and Windows 95 are
generally not viable porting targets (their vendors no longer support
them), but HP-UX 10.20 seems to still generate regular support issues.
The autoconf mailing list has tried to support an even wider array of
platforms than gnulib.  On the other hand, we can pretty much concede that
any platform worth targetting these days has a C89 (or almost C89)
compiler; the need to support K&R compilers as the primary vendor compiler
for bootstrapping a system has pretty much died in the last two or three
years.

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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