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Re: Wish for 2002 ...
- From: tb at becket dot net (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
- To: Roland McGrath <roland at frob dot com>
- Cc: Paul Eggert <eggert at twinsun dot com>, leclerc at austin dot sns dot slb dot com, security-audit at ferret dot lmh dot ox dot ac dot uk, libc-alpha at sources dot redhat dot com, open-source at csl dot sri dot com
- Date: 10 Jan 2002 22:30:06 -0800
- Subject: Re: Wish for 2002 ...
- References: <20020111055030.DBC421BA01@perdition.linnaean.org>
Roland McGrath <roland@frob.com> writes:
> > If you think the answer is "obviously not" then why do we have gets and
> > getwd?
>
> Those interfaces existed and were in use at the time GNU libc was
> written. That is why. Programs predating GNU libc used them and
> lacking them would break source backward compatibility. That is not
> true of any recent invention. Programs using (e.g.) strlcpy et al
> already are not portable to many extant systems, so continuing their
> lack does not impose new difficulties.
Sure they do impose new difficulties!
Once we could say "BSD programs compile under glibc with no
library-related incompatibilities" and "A goal of glibc is to function
as a replacement for the system library".
With deviations like this, we lose the ability to say either of those
two statements. I contend that statements like those are the whole
reason for caring about standards in the first place.
There is more reason for tracking BSD's innovations than for tracking
XOpen's and Posix's, for the simple reason that when we track a BSD
innovation we automatically gain a slight increment in portability,
but tracking Xopen or Posix doesn't give any portability until some
other system does the same. Of course we should track XOpen and
Posix, but likewise, and even more so, we should track BSD.