Re: [PATCH 8/8] fts: do not exhaust memory when processing million-entry directories

[Jim Meyering]

Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hi Jim,
>
> About this change of fts.c from 2011-08-18.
> The declaration of max_entries in line 1339 comes after a statement. Not
> valid C99.

s/C99/C89/

> gnulib's conventions are still to not require a C99 compiler.

Hi Bruno,

I see so much more value in using C99's decl-after-statement feature
than in accommodating the oh-so-few relevant compilers that still lack
support that I have a hard time justifying gnulib's current policy.

Do you still object to allowing declarations after statements in gnulib?
If so, can you estimate when you will relax that stance?

If you still think it's a problem, I don't mind adjusting fts.c
to accommodate, but I would like to know how far it is to the light
at the end of this tunnel.

Here is an alternative to imposing a blanket policy:

    Allow/encourage use of C99, but heed requests for conversion to C89,
    if there are any.  There will be none via any package I maintain,
    since they all already use the decl-after-statement feature elsewhere.
    If no one else is using the fts module, there will be no problem
    with this particular case.

C89 is now more than 12 years old, and wide support
for decl-after-statement is years older than that.
Let it die ;-)