Re: [9fans] APE inconsistencies

[Charles Forsyth]

On 29 March 2013 17:13, Jeff Sickel <j...@corpus-callosum.com> wrote:

Does anyone know if the netdb.h inclusion of hstrerror(int) was
just a copy/paste error?  Of if hstrerror() was intended to be
in the ape/lib/bsd source but got dropped somehow?

the linux manual page describes hstrerror as obsolete

[Jeff Sickel]

Does anyone know if the netdb.h inclusion of hstrerror(int) was
just a copy/paste error? Of if hstrerror() was intended to be
in the ape/lib/bsd source but got dropped somehow?

-jas

[Jeff Sickel]

On Mar 29, 2013, at 12:20 PM, Charles Forsyth <charles...@gmail.com> wrote:

> the linux manual page describes hstrerror as obsolete

Which distro? So many to choose from…

[Kurt H Maier]

It's sort of moot, since The Man wants you to stop using gethostbyname
and friends anyway. They're marked as 'obsolete' because POSIX.1-2001
wants you to use getnameinfo et al. instead.

Anything using gethostbyname is probably going to want herror (and thus
hstrerror) to be there.

khm

[Charles Forsyth]

On 29 March 2013 17:41, Kurt H Maier <kh...@intma.in> wrote:

Anything using gethostbyname is probably going to want herror (and thus
hstrerror) to be there.

I see, although it seems herror/hstrerror is usually ifdef'd out, even when gethostbyname remains!

[Jeff Sickel]

Though if I check recent FreeBSD manuals, it's all there.  And given that

this is part of the BSD extensions to APE, those might be more relevant

than the Linux man pages.  Not that BSD tries to be POSIX compliant

any more or less than GNU/Linux.

There are definitely some issues in gethostbyaddr() that are being

looked into at this time.  But while the review is taking place, it doesn' t

hurt to look at other potential areas of a mismatch.

[tlar...@polynum.com]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 01:26:53PM -0500, Jeff Sickel wrote:
>
> Though if I check recent FreeBSD manuals, it's all there. And given that
> this is part of the BSD extensions to APE, those might be more relevant
> than the Linux man pages. Not that BSD tries to be POSIX compliant
> any more or less than GNU/Linux.
>

It should be indeed underlined that this is a compatibility feature, and
not a POSIX feature. It seems that it is still here for legacy
compatibility on BSD (it is still here in NetBSD for example) but the
question arises whether it is worth supporting (because starting to
support all not POSIX is a daunting task).

This is what is said in the APE paper. The problem is not with Plan9
APE, it is that there are not a lot of programs that are written in a
POSIX compliant way...

--
Thierry Laronde <tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com>
http://www.kergis.com/
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C

[Kurt H Maier]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 08:03:45PM +0100, tlar...@polynum.com wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 01:26:53PM -0500, Jeff Sickel wrote:
> >
> > Though if I check recent FreeBSD manuals, it's all there. And given that
> > this is part of the BSD extensions to APE, those might be more relevant
> > than the Linux man pages. Not that BSD tries to be POSIX compliant
> > any more or less than GNU/Linux.
> >
>
> It should be indeed underlined that this is a compatibility feature, and
> not a POSIX feature. It seems that it is still here for legacy
> compatibility on BSD (it is still here in NetBSD for example) but the
> question arises whether it is worth supporting (because starting to
> support all not POSIX is a daunting task).
>
> This is what is said in the APE paper. The problem is not with Plan9
> APE, it is that there are not a lot of programs that are written in a
> POSIX compliant way...
>

It is a POSIX feature, I think. It's just an outmoded one. Supporting
all revisions of POSIX is damn near impossible. Does APE have an
explicit target?

khm

[tlar...@polynum.com]

On Fri, Mar 29, 2013 at 03:12:20PM -0400, Kurt H Maier wrote:
>
> It is a POSIX feature, I think. It's just an outmoded one. Supporting
> all revisions of POSIX is damn near impossible. Does APE have an
> explicit target?

Well, it is not in SuSv3. And this is not already the latest...

[Charles Forsyth]

On 29 March 2013 20:10, <tlar...@polynum.com> wrote:

> It is a POSIX feature, I think.  It's just an outmoded one.  Supporting
> all revisions of POSIX is damn near impossible.  Does APE have an
> explicit target?

I think it's really a pragmatic matter of which interfaces are in some standard that can be named,

that are also needed by most software that's being imported (eg, newer versions of Python).

[Lyndon Nerenberg]

On 2013-03-29, at 11:26 AM, Jeff Sickel wrote:

> Not that BSD tries to be POSIX compliant
> any more or less than GNU/Linux.

FreeBSD is actually pretty good about adhering to POSIX/SUS/Xopen when you set the appropriate defines.

[a...@9srv.net]

> It should be indeed underlined that this is a compatibility
> feature, and not a POSIX feature.

APE does an excellent job of making that distinction clear.
Its use of defines to forcibly break syntax was quite
educational as a young programmer.

Anthony