Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2002 12:39:49 -0800 From: David Schultz <dschultz@uclink.Berkeley.EDU> To: Marc Recht <marc@informatik.uni-bremen.de> Cc: freebsd-standards@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: POSIX and the real life or FreeBSD too strict ? Message-ID: <20021208203949.GA535@HAL9000.homeunix.com> In-Reply-To: <584000000.1039360297@leeloo.intern.geht.de> References: <584000000.1039360297@leeloo.intern.geht.de>
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Thus spake Marc Recht <marc@informatik.uni-bremen.de>: > I became conviced that FreeBSD is (way) too strict. IMHO no non-POSIX is > available isn't workable in the real world and isn't neccessary regarding > the standard. (IMHO it isn't even in the spirit of the standard..) If I > catched the standard correctly it demands only that the POSIX > function/defines/headers are available not that others are not. (Please > correct me if I'm wrong.) > And, most important, it isn't done on the other UNIX implementations out > there (at least none I know about..). So we get needlessly a lot of > uncompileable code. Which forces vendors to do extra work to deal with > specifically. > Are there any plans to change FreeBSD's behaviour to be less strict ? What you're asking for is reasonable, but there's a problem of namespace pollution. A application that uses only POSIX features is supposed to compile on a conforming implementation when _POSIX_C_SOURCE is appropriately defined. If standard headers add extra symbols and macros that are not specified in POSIX, you can't make that guarantee due to potential name conflicts. The whole point of using _POSIX_SOURCE is to turn of extensions that might break things. By the way, Solaris also has the behavior you're complaining about, but there is a workaround. If you define _POSIX_C_SOURCE, you get precisely the features specified in POSIX, and if you additionally define __EXTENSIONS__, you get everything. I'm not sure what ``other UNIX implementations'' you've been looking at, but a cursory glance at glibc reveals that it is in the same boat as FreeBSD. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the message
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