Re: Drop Gnulib support for ecvt, fcvt, gcvt, getw, putw?

[Bruno Haible]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> The functions ecvt, fcvt, gcvt, getw, putw are no longer in POSIX and 
> the glibc manual pretty much recommends against them. How about if we 
> drop Gnulib support for them? This would speed up 'configure' a bit, 
> among other things. As far as I know nobody uses them.

I think this is a wrong axis of optimization. If we start with these
functions - which may speed up configure by maybe 1% - , next will be
the question about other "rarely" used functions. And in order to
reach an optimization of 20%, you need to remove a *lot* of them. So
many of them, that we'll eventually break packages that use Gnulib
and practically defeat the purpose of porting POSIX to all platforms.

It is more promising IMO to look for other axes of optimizations:
(B) Combine multiple AC_CHECK_DECLS_ONCE or gl_WARN_ON_USE_PREPARE for
    different functions into a single compiler invocation, at least
    for the common case when GCC is used.
(C) Remove workarounds for specific platforms. I this it by now we can
    consider OSF/1, IRIX, and HP-UX as museum systems.

(C) needs to be done with care, because it can easily introduce regressions
on other, still used, systems.

Therefore my favourite would be (B).

Bruno