Re: making coreutils depend on c99

[Jim Meyering]

Albert Chin <address@hidden> wrote:
...
>> I expect to provide a patch to convert the initially-few
>> uses of c99-specific constructs to equivalent c89 ones.
>> The manual steps required to build with a pre-c99 compiler
>> will encourage stragglers to obtain/provide a more modern compiler.
>
> Then it won't build on Solaris 2.6, HP-UX 10.20, Tru64 UNIX 4.0D, and
> maybe AIX 4.3.3. Newer compilers are not available for these
> platforms.

All of those systems are rather old.
Last I heard, one could build gcc on all of them.
So, people building coreutils will have a choice: apply the
c99->c89 patch or install a modern compiler and use that
instead of the vendor-supplied one.

I might even make configure apply the patch when needed.

> Is it really worth it?

We'll see.