Re: Fix for lib/same-inode.h for VMS

[John E. Malmberg]

On 6/4/2017 4:32 PM, Paul Eggert wrote:
> John E. Malmberg wrote:
> > VMS 8.2 and later provide a 64 bit ino_t type when _USE_STD_STAT is 
> > defined on the command line.
>
> Thanks for the heads-up. I see that 8.2 came out in 2005; I guess news 
> travels slowly from the VMS world to the Gnulib world.

The Sourceforge GNV project has a backlog of things to get into shape 
for submission or set up as a supplemental library.  We are trying to 
keep close to current, but are not yet able to build "master" branches.

GNV is now:

Bash 4.3.46   bzip2 1.0-6    coreutils 8.26       diffutils 3.5
gawk 4.1-4    grep 2.25      make-3.78.1-forked   ncompress 4.2.4
sed 4.2-2

gzip 1.7 is currently in test state.
tar  1.29 port just starting.
xz port just starting.

> Instead of a pragma for checking, how about if we define _USE_STD_STAT 
> all the time? That makes sense for Gnulib-using applications. Also, I 
> don't see why __DECC is relevant here; shouldn't the decision be 
> compiler-independent? Anyway, for now I installed the attached patch.

I do not know if the pragma for the assert would be valid for anything 
other than __DECC compiler which was why the check was present.  The 
assert and related comments were to make it clear to other VMS 
programmers that it was intentional that _USE_STD_STAT was needed in 
this case.  They would not be likely to look at the .m4 files when a 
compile fails.

The autoconfig/automake tools do not work yet on VMS.  There is a 
volunteer trying to make it work, but based on how much time they have 
had recently it looks like it will be a while before that is an option.

It has only been a short while that the GNV project has been able to run 
the configure scripts on VMS.  And we are still having issues trying to 
get make check to work in some cases.

We do not use Configure scripts for building Bash, Coreutils, gawk, sed, 
and the make fork, as we need to build at least these first to get the 
configure scripts to run.

Regards
-John