Re: Gauge interest in an XDR implementation

[Simon Josefsson]

"Richard W.M. Jones" <address@hidden> writes:

> I maintain portableXDR (http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/portablexdr/)
> which is an XDR library for Windows and Macs.  As far as I'm aware it
> is only used by libvirt (http://libvirt.org/), and only on platforms
> which lack any XDR library (ie. Windows) or a usable XDR library (Macs
> and other Unix systems).
>
> I'd like to know whether Gnulib developers would be interested in
> taking on an XDR implementation (based on the one in glibc)?

I have no immediate use for it, but I can see how it can become handy.
One concern is the copyright status.  It doesn't seem to be owned by the
FSF, which is normally a pre-condition for inclusion in gnulib.

The request brings up the issue of what the limits of what can be in
gnulib.  I'm not sure it is a useful discussion...  Anyway, for example,
libtasn1 is used by GnuTLS, Shishi, and probably some other projects as
well, and I have thought about proposing parts of it as gnulib modules.
Probably the only reason I haven't done so already is because the code
is quite hard to read and maintain.

/Simon