Re: printf POSIX compliance

[Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx>]

On Fri, Jun 08, 2012 at 04:43:45PM +0100, Reuben Thomas wrote:
> On 8 June 2012 16:29, Rich Felker <dalias@aerifal.cx> wrote:
> >
> > Thanks; I think that settles it then. I wonder if they'd accept a
> > patch upstream to fix this bug..
> 
> The answer is very much "yes", in my experience (I'm not a gnulib
> developer, but I have submitted patches on several occasions).
> bug-gnulib@gnu.org!

I was referring to m4, which seems largely unmaintained, not gnulib.
My view is that it's a bug to be directly using gnulib functions that
are not (and cannot be) portable and that presumably only exist for
the sake of implementing replacement functions on a finite known set
of broken systems for which the existing code suffices.

Of course it would be nice if gnulib could do something to prevent
this sort of situation from arising in the future too (and fix the
bugs I found in the tests and reported elsewhere in this thread), but
since gnulib is integrated into packages that use it, resolving even
those issues also requires getting the new fixed version deployed into
the affected packages.

Rich