Hi Gary,
> why not enhance
> gnulib to provide a shim that sits between the system libraries and
> client code that wants to use it without shipping (another copy) of
> the particular parts it depends upon?
It does not take a lot of steps to do that:
1) $ gnulib-tool --create-testdir `posix-modules`
The 'posix-modules' script is in gnulib; it was just out of order for a
long time.
2) package up the testdir
3) build and install it on your platform.
4) Deal with config.h, i.e. rename it to 'shim-config.h' and adjust
the generated .h files. Some C macros, like _GNU_SOURCE or __EXTENSIONS__,
need to be put into CPPFLAGS, however.
5) Document what to put into CPPFLAGS and what into LDFLAGS.
The problems of this approach are in the presentation / in the relations
with the community:
- People will say that it's not complete, not understand that it's
work in progress.
- People will not understand that if they use it for their package,
they may need to contribute at some point.
- Additional API that are extensions over POSIX would likely be omitted.
But they are also an essential part of gnulib.
and in the points that Eric mentioned:
- gnulib is doing backward-incompatible changes now and then.
- gnulib has some "features" modules, like 'sigpipe', which cause additional
code to be injected into many other modules. Not everyone needs these
features.
Bruno
