John W. Eaton wrote:
...
> But at first, the users who were most affected by the transition had
> some difficulty seeing the advantages of gnulib. I'm afraid that they
> started to think I was actively getting in the way by breaking Octave
> on non-GNU systems. The worst problems were encountered on Windows
> with MSVC. The person who builds Octave most frequently on this system
> was not happy that switching a library that was supposed to improve
> portability did not work as well as the portability hacks we had been
> using.
>
> Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that there is quite a bit of
> overlap with MinGW with a small number of things that are needed for
> MSVC but not MinGW. Would it cause a lot of trouble to accept patches
> for MSVC and preserve code for MSVC even when it is no longer needed
> for MinGW? We could certainly tell people that unless someone steps
> forward to be the maintainer of code for the MSVC-specific parts of
> gnulib, then there are no guarantees about whether it works and if
> it breaks they get to keep the pieces.
That's fair.
If octave (or any other project) starts using the ftruncate
module on a system that requires it, just let me know and I'll
remove the "obsolete" notice.
If nothing changes, we'll revisit the question in 2012:
>From 38e3c69497f5413d59c4fba50b7a9268b6d5eb84 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Jim Meyering <meyer...@redhat.com>
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 2010 19:14:37 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] ftruncate: add two years to projected module removal date: 2012
* m4/ftruncate.m4: Adjust comments.
---
ChangeLog | 3 +++
m4/ftruncate.m4 | 6 ++++--
2 files changed, 7 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index 1f76dc5..e6747aa 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,5 +1,8 @@
2010-04-09 Jim Meyering <meyer...@redhat.com>
+ ftruncate: add two years to projected module removal date: 2012
+ * m4/ftruncate.m4: Adjust comments.
+
ftruncate: mark module as obsolete; even MinGW provides it, now
* modules/ftruncate (Status): Obsolete.
(Notice): Say that.
diff --git a/m4/ftruncate.m4 b/m4/ftruncate.m4
index 95e371b..50e8678 100644
--- a/m4/ftruncate.m4
+++ b/m4/ftruncate.m4
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-# serial 14
+# serial 15
# See if we need to emulate a missing ftruncate function using fcntl or chsize.
@@ -7,10 +7,12 @@
# gives unlimited permission to copy and/or distribute it,
# with or without modifications, as long as this notice is preserved.
-# FIXME: remove this macro, along with all uses of HAVE_FTRUNCATE in 2010,
+# FIXME: remove this macro, along with all uses of HAVE_FTRUNCATE in 2012,
# if the check below provokes no more reports. So far, the only report
# arose from a test build of this gnulib module, cross-compiling to mingw:
# <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.gnulib.bugs/9203>
+# Now (in 2010), MSVC has been raised as a possible target:
+# <http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.gnulib.bugs/21394/focus=21396>
AC_DEFUN([gl_FUNC_FTRUNCATE],
[
--
1.7.1.rc0.239.g8b27e
