On 12/02/19 21:32, Eric S. Raymond wrote: > Having further examined the groff sources, I see that there is one > thing the POSIX/C99 cleanup would have to drop: MS Visual C support.
Which, in consequence, would utterly break support on MS-Windows; an excellent strategy for branding yourself as "public enemy no. 1". > I doubt this is actually much of a problem. You would be very sadly wrong! > There has been no work on that support since 2005, 12 years ago. So, it has been stable for 12 years (actually 14 years); that does *not* mean that it is no longer relevant, yet you want to turn around and destroy it? > Since then, MINGW and the DeLorie compiler have offered generally > satisfactory support for programs in groff's class. Indeed, Microsoft > itself has much improved its support for the POSIX API and now has a > stdlib.h header. Huh? What has that to do with *anything*? MSVC has had a stdlib.h header *forever* ... i.e. since MSVC version 1.0 originally appeared. It has, and never has had, anything to do with POSIX/C99 compatibility; Windows is *not* a POSIX compatible platform, and while C99 support may have improved somewhat, in the very newest versions of MSVC, that support remains sketchy, and it most certainly *does not* propagate back into the MSVCRT.DLL implementations, on which free compilers such as MinGW are obliged to depend, (even on the newest Windows versions). I suspect that much of the code you are targetting as MSVC specific is actually the code I wrote, around 14 years ago, to support *MinGW* (and not specific to MSVC at all). I can't speak for the requirements of the DJGPP compiler, but rip that out, and you kill MinGW support. -- Keith.
