Re: [Chicken-hackers] [PATCH] use consistent naming for allocating unsafe SRFI-4 accessors

[Peter Bex]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 12:59:17PM +0100, Felix wrote:
> > Shouldn't this be a CR, or at least keep around the old names for
> > one release, in deprecated state?
> 
> No, this does not belong to the official C API. 

OK!

> > By the way, speaking of deprecations, now that we have deprecation
> > warnings from the scrutinizer, we should probably also add them for
> > C functions and perhaps types as well.
> 
> I don't like this much. Too much effort for something non-productive.
> I actually changed the deprecation warnings in the scrutinizer to
> "notices" (so they are only shown with in verbose mode) - thinking
> about your suggestion to make deprecation more verbose made me come to
> the conclusion that it must be quite annoying for someone who perhaps
> doesn't care (because he does not intend to update, for example).

I think that's not a good idea; it's better to show them by default and
perhaps add an option to suppress them.  Normal usage is to follow the
upgrade cycle, and having a user's stuff suddenly break because they
forgot to run with the verbose option is a nuisance.

By the way, we could do the same for C deprecation warnings; wrap it in
a #ifdef that enables/disables these warnings.  Chicken could even pass
the -Dblabla option based on the same option it uses to determine whether
to show these warnings from the scrutinizer.

By the way, why is it much effort?  It's just a couple of lines that
add the option, and we're usually marking stuff as deprecated in comments
anyway.

> This reminds me painfully of the linker warnings OpenBSD produces for
> the use of "sprintf", one of the most annoying things ever, and one
> reason not to use OpenBSD.

These warnings are completely valid; there aren't many ways that sprintf
can be used safely.

> > By the way, is MSVC still supported at all?  I saw some reference to
> > it near the top of chicken.h (line 117):
> > 
> > #ifndef _MSC_VAR
> > # include <strings.h>
> > #endif
> 
> I removed this. MSVC is not supported.

Thanks!

Cheers,
Peter
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