Subject: Re: `sun' and sparc/sun3's (was: Re: Diaspora, politics, and MI)
To: None <current-users@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Robert Black <r.black@ic.ac.uk>
List: current-users
Date: 09/26/1996 21:46:08
On Sep 26,  3:17pm, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> Subject: Re: `sun' and sparc/sun3's (was: Re: Diaspora, politics, and MI)
> [ On Thu, September 19, 1996 at 11:15:15 (-0700), Jason Thorpe wrote: ]
> > Subject: Re: `sun' and sparc/sun3's (was: Re: Diaspora, politics, and MI)
> >
> > On Thu, 19 Sep 1996 10:13:57 -0700
> >  greywolf@siva.captech.com (Grey Wolf) wrote:
> >
> >  > I think this would be a Bad Thing [TM].  There's an awful lot of code
> >  > out there that depends upon 'unix' (or some variant thereof) being
> >  > defined in order to include/compile correctly.
> >  >
> >  > What do we gain by deleting these?
> >
> > ANSI namespace cleanup.
>
> Yikes!  I don't usually mind conforming to standards, but '-Dunix' is as
> old as the OS itself, which should be good ebough for a standard itself;
> and I thought it was in fact actually specified by one of the POSI -- it
> certainly should beX
> sub-sets.
>
> I for one will be adding it back in if it disappears -- I'd rather
> maintain one more local patch to NetBSD than attempt to fix a zillion
> third party packages.....

Well, anything which compiles on IRIX using cc -ansi or on Solaris using cc -Xc
can't use it. I would prefer people to have to *think* to switch on the
backwards compatibility, otherwise you get people writing new codes which
require it. It really isn't very hard to put a wrapper around cc so that you
just have to prepend a directory onto your path every time you encounter a
legacy package. I noticed that the X consortium have recently cleaned up their
namespace usage. I'm sure that wasn't a small task.

Cheers

Rob Black

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