Re: remove 'exit'?

[James Youngman]

On Sun, May 1, 2011 at 8:47 PM, Simon Josefsson <address@hidden> wrote:
> How about just removing the module?  If something breaks, the maintainer
> can track it down, and will notice that the module disappeared, and fix
> the package.  If nothing breaks, it is normally just a portability
> problem that will be noticed eventually when someone builds the package.
> The only real danger is if nothing breaks and the resulting code is
> insecure as a result.  I think that is a rather rare occurance.

I agree.   I just tracked down a findutils bug to a change in Autoconf
which changed the spelling of a macro[*].   The bug persisted in
findutils for 11 years!   So I'm all for explicit failures rather than
things it's possible to ignore or get wrong by accident.


[*] In fairness it was a move from a deprecated Autoconf macro to its
documented replacement.   The problem was that the C preprocessor
macro test should have been changed too, but wasn't.   Hence this
isn't the fault of Autoconf really.   But still I prefer designs that
make this unlikely (e.g. explicitly scanning for the obsolete
spelling).

James.