Am Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 11:02:21AM -0400 schrieb Andrew Bell:
> I guess I don't understand the opposition -- is there any downside to musl
> to having the macros defined, necessary or not? (I'm saying this as a
> minimalist, so I'm surprising myself here.)
>
Yes, it makes people write worse code. Not making the macros available
makes people write more portable code, which is a good thing. Sometimes
people have to be made to think for a moment, and broken out of their
rut, to get them to do the right thing.
I guess I just don't think this is the job of a library -- to be the arbiter of other people's programming. I may have seen some code inside musl that I personally don't like ;)
There is also the issue of what exactly the macros mean. Between
distribution patches and backports, a version number does not
necessarily map to a feature or bug set. And musl does not want to have
any quirks, it wants to just be a POSIX implementation. So what
specialties are supposed to be kept in mind when the musl macro is
defined?
I understand if it can't be done well, but I would hope that it's not a big deal to do. I do appreciate the adherence to standards and it seems perfectly fine to respond to questions/proposals with "that's not the way the standard works." But if this is easy, I just don't see the downside from the standpoint of maintaining musl.