Re: release candidate 5 available

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> "Be conservative in what you produce; liberal in what you accept."
> Using -ansi in development catches things that are not part of the standard
> and therefore might not be accepted by other compilers.

[...]

> Notwithstanding that, the -ansi flag does go part of the way.
> For example, without -ansi, gcc will merily accept // style comments which
> are not part of the ansi standard (until recently).

But it makes lots of code not work at all.  It broke off_t on
Solaris and made -Wformat more or less useless even on GNU/Linux.
Autoconf intentionally never chooses to use the -ansi option.

Furthermore, the way we were adding -ansi only at build time, not
at configure time, is a bad idea.  The -ansi flag turns off
plenty of features provided by the compiler and headers, but
"configure" had already checked that those features were there.
Thus, inconsistencies arose.

I don't think -ansi is appropriate for a program that wants to
use compiler and system extensions.
-- 
"Unix... is not so much a product
 as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history
 of the hacker subculture."
--Neal Stephenson