Re: Cross-platform availability of header files

[Paul Eggert]

On 03/14/2013 06:19 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote:
> 1) What "interesting portability targets" have I left out?  I only
> went back in time as far as FreeBSD 7, and I didn't even try to get my
> hands on any of the surviving proprietary Unixes; is this too
> shortsighted?

Yes, I think so.  We regularly get bug reports from people running
HP-UX, AIX, etc.

> 2) Autoconf currently probes for several of the headers in the "safely
> assumed to exist everywhere" categories, notably in
> AC_INCLUDES_DEFAULT.  It seems to me that this is unnecessary.  Would
> patches to remove under-the-hood checks for the ubiquitous headers,
> and deprecate macros that do explicit checks for them, be accepted?

If it's safe to include them now, we should stop checking for them.

> 3) It's a little tangential, but don't you think it's about time
> AC_CHECK_HEADERS stopped doing all its tests two different ways?

I would change this, yes.