[Bug-gnulib] Re: xalloc module dependencies

[Simon Josefsson]

"Gary V. Vaughan" <address@hidden> writes:

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> Bruno Haible wrote:
> | Gary V. Vaughan wrote:
> |
> |>shouldn't xalloc Depends-on: cite memset and memcpy?
> |
> |
> | Whether or not memset and memcpy should be listed as dependencies, depends
> | on your porting target. For ca. a year or two, the majority of gnulib users
> | targets portability only to systems that support ANSI C 89, i.e. to systems
> | that date from ca. 1992 or newer. These targets don't need memset and memcpy
> | replacements any more.
> |
> | If you target older systems too (I think GNU tar still does this), you need
> | to add those gnulib modules listed in section "Support for systems lacking
> | ANSI C 89" of MODULES.html which are relevant to your package.
>
> Okay, thanks.
>
> But that does seem unnecessarily confusing.  Does gnulib itself support
> pre-c89 systems?  If it does we should list the dependencies correctly (and
> add a little bloat to every gnulib client in exchange for better pre-c89
> compatibility), otherwise memset and memcpy don't belong in gnulib (GNU tar
> should ship them itself in that case).

Perhaps what is needed is a new 'prec89-depends-on:' field, and a
parameter to gnulib-tool to say whether it should assume c89 (the
default, IMHO) or not?

It seems unfriendly to application authors to require them to wade
through the source code of gnulib modules to find what pre-C89 modules
they must add manually.