rra-c-util 8.3

In this release of my utility library for my other packages, I finally decided to drop support for platforms without a working snprintf.

This dates back to the early 2000s and a very early iteration of this package. At the time, there were still some older versions of UNIX without snprintf at all. More commonly, it was buggy. The most common problem was that it would return -1 if the buffer wasn't large enough rather than returning the necessary size of the buffer. Or, in some cases, it wouldn't support a buffer size of 0 and a NULL buffer to get the necessary size.

At the time I added this support for INN and some other packages, Solaris had several of these issues. But C99 standardized the correct snprintf behavior, and slowly every maintained operating system was fixed. (I forget whether it was fixed in Solaris 8 or Solaris 9, but regardless, Solaris has had a working snprintf for many years.) Meanwhile, the replacement function (Patrick Powell's version, also used by mutt and other packages) was a huge wad of code and a corresponding test suite. Over time, I've increased the aggressiveness of linters to try to catch more dangerous C pitfalls, and that's required carrying more and more small modifications plus a preamble to disable various warnings that I didn't want to try to fix.

The straw that broke the camel's back was Clang's new case fallthrough warning. Clang stopped supporting the traditional /* fallthrough */ comment. It now prefers [[clang:fallthrough]] syntax, but of course older compilers choke on that. It does support the GCC __attribute__((__fallthrough__)) syntax, but older compilers don't like that construction because they think it's an empty statement. It was a mess, and I decided the time had come to drop this support effort.

At this point, if you're still running an operating system without C99 snprintf, I think it's essentially a retrocomputing or at least extremely stable legacy production situation, and you're unlikely to want the latest and greatest releases of new software. Hopefully that assumption is correct, or at least correct enough.

(I realize the right solution to this problem is probably for me to use Gnulib for portability. But converting to it is a whole other project with a lot of other implications and machinery, and I'm not sure that's what I want to spend time on.)

Also in this release is a fix for network tests on hosts with no IPv4 addresses (more on this when I release the next version of remctl), fixes for style issues found by Perl::Critic::Freenode, and some other test suite improvements.

You can get the latest version from the rra-c-util distribution page.

Posted: 2020-08-09 19:15 — Why no comments?

Last spun 2022-02-06 from thread modified 2020-08-10