Re: Patches for slrn

Jörg Sommer <[email protected]> wrote:
>> However some systems require additional networking libraries that this
>> check brings in.  For example on solaris the macro will pull in the
>> socket and nsl libraries.  Without it, slrn will not compile.
>
> This sounds strange: Include the X libraries to get network support.
> Isn't it better to include the network libraries directly? Are you sure
> this check doesn't pull in some other unneeded dependencies on X
> libraries?

Take a look at the AC_PATH_XTRA macro in the libs.m4 file of the
autoconf distribution.  Much of the macro deals with determining a
working set of network libraries, and would need to be duplicated in
slrn's configure.ac.   slrn has been using AC_PATH_XTRA since the
1990s and as far as I know, it has not caused a problem.

[...]
>> This is not portable to all systems that slrn supports.  A more
>> portable method is to use "%lu" and cast the size_t argument to an
>> unsigned long.  Ten years ago I would have resisted using %u, because
>> it was not supported by all systems that slrn ran on.
>
> And what do you think about an (ugly) configure check with a define?

There is more too it than that.  To properly deal with the changes to
the gettext message strings that are used for translation, I will have
to modifiy the code and change, e.g.,

    slrn_message(_("This has a format specifier %zu"), sizeof(foo));

to 

    sprintf (buf, "%zu", sizeof(foo));
    slrn_message(_("This has a format specifier %s"), buf);

That way, only one such message would need to be translated.  Similar
changes are going to need to be made wherever NNTP_FMT_ARTNUM appear.

> Which system do you have in mind?

Any system where one wants to try using slrn.  I would not be
surprised if at some point I receive a patch for VMS, which previous
versions of slrn supported.

--John

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