Re: [PATCH 0/2] Modernize header checks

On 05/31/2013 10:39 AM, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Zack Weinberg <[email protected]> writes:
> 
>> Second, it cleans up AC_INCLUDES_DEFAULT and all the other canned
>> tests so that they don't waste time checking for ISO C90 headers,
>> which are now ubiquitous (stddef.h, stdlib.h, string.h, wchar.h,
>> wctype.h, locale.h, time.h) and don't use pre-standard headers that
>> were replaced by C90 headers at all (memory.h and strings.h).
> 
> I *think* your patch would remove strings.h from the list of headers that
> are probed by default by Autoconf, and hence remove HAVE_STRINGS_H from
> the preprocessor directives set by Autoconf.
> 
> If so, note that removing strings.h from the list of headers that are
> probed by default will cause backwards compatibility issues.  One still
> must include strings.h (not string.h) according to POSIX in order to get
> strcasecmp and friends, and some operating systems (specifically at least
> some versions of FreeBSD) do actually enforce that and do not prototype
> those functions in string.h.  I'm quite sure there is code out there that
> assumes that Autoconf will probe for strings.h as a side effect of other
> probes and set HAVE_STRINGS_H, and therefore doesn't probe for it
> explicitly.  (I maintain some of it, in fact.)

Yes, there is a bunch of code that non-portably assumes they can use
strcasecmp or ffs without including <strings.h>.  On the other hand,
<strings.h> is available on pretty much ALL platforms that use free
software compilers (according to gnulib, only ancient Minix 3.1.8 and
non-free MSVC 9 have problems with assuming <strings.h> exists and is
self-contained; but mingw does not have this issue).  Thus, you
generally don't need to use HAVE_STRINGS_H, but can just blindly include
it, unless your package is trying to be portable to a rather unforgiving
toolchain.

-- 
Eric Blake   eblake redhat com    +1-919-301-3266
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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