A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk wrote:
: The changes to the Poplog Widget Set sources in $usepop/pop/x/Xpw
: suggested by Andreas Eder, appear to be a move from an old style of C
: programming involving 'varargs' to a newer style involving 'stdargs'.
: As I am not a C programmer I know nothing about this.
: I've tentatively (and blindly) incorporated his changes into a copy of
: the edited Xpw sources here:
: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/src/new/x/Xpw/Xpw.tar.gz
: which can be un-tarred into
: $usepop/pop/x
: if anyone wants to try compiling them and then re-linking.
: I've checked that the changed version works on redhat 8.
: Should I assume that the changed version should be included
: from now on as standard?
: Andreas wrote:
: > ...my
: > gcc (version 3.3 20030226 (prerelease) (SuSE Linux)) no longer
: > supports the use of varargs, but insists on using stdarg.
: Presumably this is a generally agreed change in standards, and we should
: simply follow the standard?
: It would be nice not to have to have a different version of poplog for
: SuSe users.
FYI stdarg.h in in ANSI C standard from 1989. Gnu C supported it very
early (I remember it in 1992 version, but probably it was introduced
few years earlier). In 1995 using varargs.h was a smart move, as many
systems had obsolete compilers (some vendors by default shiped old
compilers with new systems, charging extra for new compiler) without
support for stdarg.h. Of 17 configurations in the Poplog tree 3 certainly
have stdarg.h (pcunix, pcwnt and sun4r5), 5 is so old that probably
do not support it (sun3, sun3x, hpbob, vaxunix4.2, vaxunix4.3) and
other are uncertain.
So the change will probably break many old configurations, but modern
ones should work OK. AFAIK one can still use old configurations, just
need first to install Gnu C.
Gnu C developers decided few months ago to drop any support for building
Gnu C on obsolete systems and not supporting varargs.h is just part
of that move.
It is easy to support both stdarg.h anh varargs.h but I am not sure
if there is any real need.
--
Waldek Hebisch
hebisch@math.uni.wroc.pl
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