On 01/27/2011 02:54 AM, Simon Josefsson wrote: > my impression is that gnulib has always been agreesive about > abandoning support for platforms that are not commercially supported > and that we can't access and test patches on.
I'm not sure what "aggressive" means, but the general rule is that we try not to waste resources maintaining code that cannot easily be tested and that increases the maintenance burden for ordinary development. Another way of putting it is, if the original platform distributor no longer supports something, that's a good indication that we shouldn't bother either, as it indicates that the audience is too small to be worth committing our scarce resources to. > For example, I believe SunOS 4 falls into this category. SunOS 4 is still documented as being a target, though this may change as per the above. I personally haven't used SunOS 4 in years; has anyone else? > This could probably be clarified in the gnulib manual Here's what it currently says. Can you suggest which clarifications would be helpful? Originally much of the Gnulib code was portable to ancient hosts like 4.2BSD, but it is a maintenance hassle to maintain compatibility with unused hosts, so currently we assume at least a freestanding C89 compiler, possibly operating with a C library that predates C89. The oldest environment currently ported to is probably SunOS 4 + GCC 1.x, though we haven't tested this exact combination. SunOS 4 last shipped on 1998-09-30, and Sun dropped support for it on 2003-10-01, so at some point we may start assuming a C89 library as well. ... Even if the include files conform to C89, the library itself may not. For example, SunOS 4's (free (NULL)) can dump core, so Gnulib code must avoid freeing a null pointer, even though C89 allows it. You can work around some of these problems by requiring the relevant modules, e.g., the Gnulib 'free' module supplies a conforming 'free'.
