rra-c-util

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

— Phil Greenspun

Blurb

rra-c-util is my collection of portability functions, utility functions, Autoconf macros, and related shared C infrastructure, akin to gnulib but without any GPL-covered code and additional support for Kerberos and PAM development. It serves as a common repository of code and infrastructure used across multiple projects so that files have a canonical latest version. It's not intended for installation as a regular package; instead, other packages are expected to copy files from here as needed.

Description

The origins of this package are in the libinn utility library in INN. Some of the utility and portability functions here are directly inspired by or based on versions in older versions of INN, and I wrote and rewrote considerable additional portability code and utility libraries when I took over INN maintenance. When I started maintaining other C packages, I started copying pieces of libinn into those packages and merging it with other portability and utility code. Over time, each package gained a slightly different version of various utility functions, replacements for missing functions, and Autoconf macros.

The goal of this package is to merge all the various versions of any portability or utility code that's used in more than one of my packages in one place. Then, each package can update to the latest rra-c-util version before each release and gain from the improvements made for all other packages. You can think of it as my version of Gnulib, with everything released under a permissive license (no GPL).

The facilities in this package try to ensure portability and backward compatibility whenever reasonable, but I will drop support for systems that are older than fifteen years if supporting them becomes a burden.

As well as C portability frameworks, Autoconf macros, and a general C utility library, this package has also accumulated a collection of standard tests (for C and Perl packages) and a small library of test utilities and support functions. It also includes extensive support for writing and testing PAM modules, and a portable implementation of AFS PAGs.

This package uses the infrastructure of C TAP Harness for testing, but is not the canonical version of tests/runtests.c, tests/tap/basic.[ch], tests/tap/macros.h, or tests/tap/libtap.sh. Those files should be pulled from C TAP Harness instead.

Requirements

Everything requires a C compiler to build and expects an ISO C89 or later C compiler and libraries. Presence of strdup is also assumed, which is guaranteed by POSIX 2008 but common in many earlier C libraries as well. Otherwise, the files are meant to be copied into packages and the requirements depend on which files one copies.

A Kerberos library, either MIT Kerberos or Heimdal, is required to build this package as-is, since the Kerberos portability layer is built and tested by default. The other code will run fine without this requirement when copied into other packages.

PAM libraries and headers are required to build the package as-is, since the PAM supporting library is built and tested by default. Other code can be copied from this package without introducing a PAM dependency.

The libevent.m4, sqlite3.m4, and systemd.m4 Autoconf macro files require the pkg-config Autoconf macros when running autoreconf or the equivalent.

To build the the kafs portability layer, one of Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris 11, the kafs library that comes with either Heimdal or KTH Kerberos, the kopenafs library that comes with newer OpenAFS, AFS header files (on any other platform besides AIX or IRIX), or AFS libraries (on AIX and IRIX) is required. AIX binaries with AFS PAG support may not run on AIX systems that do not have an AFS client installed due to how AIX handles system calls.

A dummy Perl module is built and tested as part of the rra-c-util build in order to exercise the included Perl test support libraries. This requires Perl 5.10 or later and Module::Build (available from CPAN). The included components of rra-c-util are usable without Perl (by copying them to another package), even though the build will fail.

To bootstrap from a Git checkout, or if you change the Automake files and need to regenerate Makefile.in, you will need Automake 1.11 or later. For bootstrap or if you change configure.ac or any of the m4 files it includes and need to regenerate configure or config.h.in, you will need Autoconf 2.64 or later. Perl is also required to generate manual pages from a fresh Git checkout.

Download

The distribution:

An archive of older releases is also available.

rra-c-util is maintained using the Git version control system. To check out the current development tree, see GitHub or clone:

    https://git.eyrie.org/git/devel/rra-c-util.git

Pull requests on GitHub are welcome. You can also browse the current development source.

Documentation

License

The rra-c-util package as a whole is covered by the following copyright and license:

Copyright 2000, 2009-2010, 2013-2023 Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>

Copyright 2009-2014 The Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Some individual source files are covered by other, compatible licenses. For complete copyright and license information, see the file LICENSE in the rra-c-util source distribution.