Re: dont! Re: stdbool macro, take 2

[Bruce Korb]

Guido Draheim wrote:
> being a person who has been doing some tricky stuff with a generated
> file called stdint.h, I would like to oject on generating a stdbool.h
<<reasons elided>>
I agree, with arguments about project focus and project bulk
to boot:  http://sources.redhat.com/ml/autoconf/2001-11/msg00033.html

> p.s. references are
>  http://ac-archive.sf.net/gstdint
>  http://ac-archive.sf.net/Miscellaneous/ac_create_prefix_config_h.html

The downside to "gstdint" or "gstdbool" is that they are just
the tip of an ugly iceberg.  If you were to assemble one project
for every fixable compatibility issue, you would find yourself
with a lot of projects.  In my code sourcery contest entry I
proposed a single project that ran through the million known
compatibility issues and installed whatever was needed so that
a consistent interface was available for all supported platforms.
This would mean that a "stdint.h" and a "stdbool.h" headers
would be part of it and installed as needed.  Then, instead of
bulking up every autoconf-ed project in the world with 300K
of duplicated configury overhead, a project can just have a
dependency on a minimum revision of the compatibility library.
Way, way, way simpler.  Smaller distributions.  "configure"
could focus on the with/without/enabled/disabled options for
each package.  autoconf users would not need to be M4 quoting
experts.  I suppose I'm just whistling in the wind?  ;-)