Re: [Bug-gnulib] K&R C or ANSI C89 ?

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Bruno Haible <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2002 18:07:21 +0100 (CET)
>
> - What other K&R C compatibility requirements, except for GCC, exist?

I suspect that Emacs is still supposed to build with K&R C on older
platforms.  (RMS is a traditionalist.)  It used to be that other
GCC-related tools like binutils had to build with K&R C, but I don't
know whether they're still maintaining discipline.  I wouldn't be
surprised if even Emacs failed to build with K&R C these days, as few
people have both the resources and the patience to build it on SunOS 4
boxes.

> - Has anyone recently built gettext with a compiler not supporting
>   function prototypes?

The Bison list got a bug report in August from someone who tried to
build Bison 1.35 (which includes gettext 0.11.1) on SunOS 4.1.3_U1.
That build failed because the 4.1.3_U1 shell is buggy.  He then gave
up and said he'd probably switch the box to FreeBSD.  For details
about the Sun bugs please see:

http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/autoconf/2002-August/013803.html

which is part of the thread rooted at:

http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/autoconf/2002-August/013796.html

Autoconf currently does not support SunOS 4.1.3_U1 and probably 4.1.2
and 4.1.3 due to /bin/sh bugs; you need to supply a working shell
(e.g., 4.1.1 /bin/sh, bash, or pdksh) to run Autoconf-generated
configure scripts on those platforms.  I'm getting conflicting reports
about whether 4.1.4 /bin/sh works; the Sun bug database says it should
works, but I did get one report that it didn't (but the reporter
didn't follow up to my inquiries).

Arnold Skeeve reported one user who had a similar problem with gawk on
SunOS 4.1.something.

It's clear that there are still a few hardy users running on these
ancient boxes; what's not so clear is whether we should spend much
time supporting them, since (as can be seen above) they'll have
problems other than simply K&R C problems and it's becoming
increasingly hard to support these folks now that most of the
competent maintainers no longer have access to SunOS 4 boxes.

On 2000-09-30 Sun transitioned Solaris 1.1.2 (the last SunOS 4
release) to the "vintage support" level, which means it no longer
issues patches for new bugs.  On 2003-09-30 Sun will further
transition Solaris 1.1.2 to "custom quote" level, which means you will
need to spend a lot of money (and have service division VP approval!)
in order to get a bug fixed.

Since even Sun is dropping support for SunOS 4, I think it's quite all
right if the GNU project does too.