Re: What to do about gnulib libio dependencies?

[Paul Eggert]

Zack Weinberg wrote:

> I think it would clarify this discussion if you gave concrete examples
> of existing programs that use these functions, and described what they
> are doing with them that can't be accomplished using the standard
> interfaces.

No GNU utility cares about wide streams that I know of. Wide streams were a 
mistake as far as I can tell.

As I recall, the most important user of the gnulib libio dependencies is GNU m4, 
which uses freadptr and freadseek for efficiency. GNU 'cut' is in the same camp, 
though it's less important.

GNU coreutils uses freadahead when deciding whether to fflush stdin, although I 
think this is a relatively minor optimization and wouldn't be a major loss if it 
went away.

I'll CC: this to Bruno Haible, who has more experience in this area. Bruno, the 
proposal on the table is for glibc to remove the undocumented features that let 
Gnulib implement fbufmode, freadahead, freadptr, freadseek, and fseterr; or 
instead, for glibc to export these features somehow in a way that Gnulib can 
access in a documented way. Please see the thread starting here:

https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-08/msg00412.html