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Date:      Fri, 2 Apr 2010 14:32:29 -0700
From:      Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd@gmail.com>
To:        Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>
Cc:        =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Dag=2DErling_Sm=F8rgrav?= <des@des.no>, freebsd-current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: HEADSUP: zlib updated [svn commit: r205471 - in head: . lib/libz lib/libz/contrib lib/libz/doc sys/sys]
Message-ID:  <i2n7d6fde3d1004021432i4bd96f6h1344a8c9f508104d@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100402084640.GB19647@lonesome.com>
References:  <4BA7E0B8.3080406@delphij.net> <4BAE2B4F.6060005@protected-networks.net> <4BB3FD5D.9070600@uffner.com> <r2oa78074951003312051kca872e0el511273674bd9e4b@mail.gmail.com> <86tyrvs3js.fsf@ds4.des.no> <20100402084640.GB19647@lonesome.com>

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2010/4/2 Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>:
> On Thu, Apr 01, 2010 at 03:30:47PM +0200, Dag-Erling Sm=F8rgrav wrote:
>> And yes, I *will* keep harping on this until people Get It.
>
> You're harping at the wrong people. =A0Complain to the application author=
s,
> not to the poor slobs trying to maintain the ports collection.
>
> There's a lot of crap code out there on the internet. =A0If we want to
> insist that all the application authors both a) write good code and that
> b) understands how FreeBSD does things, well, we can do that, but it's
> not going to have much effect.
>
> Probably 75%+ of the application authors neither know nor care that
> their code is being run on anything other than Linux. =A0In extreme
> cases we've enountered authors who outright refuse to accept our
> patches, either due to philosophical disagreement or just due to the
> xtra hassle.

The problem actually was most likely the fact that the functionality
wasn't properly documented or that people didn't thoroughly read or
understand the documentation before implementing the feature. If
there's anything that I've learned from cleaning up messes in the past
(to be fair, some which I've created as well), it's that a lot of
incorrect logic is created by misunderstanding things and/or making
false assumptions on how things should work.

But yes, zlib is buggy w.r.t. the item Xin Li mentioned and needed to
be fixed. Too many folks try to resolve application porting issues by
using inline:

#ifndef SOME_LARGELY_USED_CONSTANT_INTRODUCED_IN_VERSION_B
/* #define a constant or typedef a feature */
#endif

This generally quasi-works in versions A (assuming the application
runs and the developer upstream did their testing on version A's
software... heh) or version C (typically a Linux) developer decided
that they wanted to change the definition and dashed the consequences
about backwards compatibility in their code. kernel.org sources are
riddled with this kind of `decision making'.

But I digress...

-Garrett



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