Re: recommend strdup or strdup-posix?

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Simon,

> I was using strdup and it triggered this warning in gnulib:
> 
>   _GL_WARN_ON_USE (strdup, "strdup is unportable - "
>                    "use gnulib module strdup for portability");
> So string.h should probably point to strdup-posix?

Yes. The warning is inconsistent with the documentation at
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/strdup.html>.
Feel free to fix the warning.

> However the strdup module is deprecated according to modules/strdup:
> 
>   This module is obsolete. But you may want to use the strdup-posix module.

It is obsolete, not deprecated. Which means, you don't normally need
the 'strdup' module, but you _can_ use it. This is documented at
<http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Obsolete-modules.html>

> But what is the purpose of the strdup module then?  According to
> 
> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/strdup.html

... the purpose is portability to extremely old systems.

> Can't we just rename strdup-posix to strdup?

I wouldn't do it, because few people really use the value of 'errno'
after an strdup failure. The typical idiom is to just terminate the
current block or function when strdup fails.

> I suspect strdup is one of the initial modules a new gnulib user would
> import, so this complexity might be confusing and I don't see the gain.

Yes, strdup is one of the first functions someone can stumble upon.
If the documentation at
  <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/strdup.html>
  <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnulib/manual/html_node/Obsolete-modules.html>
is not clear, please, what can be done to improve it?

Bruno