Re: [PATCH] ftruncate: mark module as obsolete; even MinGW provides it, now

[John W. Eaton]

On  9-Apr-2010, Paolo Bonzini wrote:

| On 04/09/2010 11:04 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:
| > Indeed. But since mingw has it but MSVC doesn't, this raises the
| > question: how important is the MSVC porting platform (use Microsoft's
| > compiler and include files [proprietary but downloadable at zero cost
| > from Microsoft's web site], with possibly a wrapper script like
| > 'cccl')?
| 
| I think for mingwex-provided function we should not mark modules as
| obsolete outright; it depends on the amount of code and dependencies, IMO.
| 
| > On one hand, there have been attempts to add support for this
| > platform to libtool. On the other hand, this platforms lacks
| > <dirent.h>, opendir, readdir, but we have not had a single request
| > for supporting this in gnulib in 7 years.
| 
| dirent functions are actually not _that_ much used.

Sorry for jumping in late to this thread...

Octave, which attempts to be buildable with MSVC, uses dirent.h and
the functions opendir, readdir, and closedir.  My understanding is
that these functions are not available by default when compiling with
MSVC.  We have some lame replacements for these functions, and I think
Emacs also has replacements for them.  I would guess that there are
other implementations out there as well.  But it would be much better
if there were some replacements in gnulib.

OTOH, Octave doesn't absolutely require these functions or dirent.h,
but we do need some (hopefully portable) way to get a list of files in
a directory.

What's the right gnulibish way to do that, and will it work on Windows
systems with MSVC?

Thanks,

jwe