Re: Portability of libtextstyle

[Akim Demaille]

Hi Bruno,

Thanks for coming back about this!

> Le 29 juil. 2020 à 11:08, Bruno Haible <bruno@clisp.org> a écrit :
> 
> Hi Akim,
> 
>> Here's my proposal to update the check for libtextstyle.
>> 
>> Cheers!
>> 
>> commit 76c00e218869dab03ec4a1f503495e0d729d0b97
>> Author: Akim Demaille <akim.demaille@gmail.com>
>> Date:   Sun Jul 26 18:00:10 2020 +0200
>> 
>>    libtextstyle: check the API of the latest release
>> 
>>    * m4/libtextstyle.m4 (gl_LIBTEXTSTYLE): Require ostream_printf and
>>    styled_ostream_get_hyperlink_ref.
> 
> Having thought a while about it... I would prefer that users have
> the possibility to request any libtextstyle vs. request a libtextstyle
> which defines ostream_printf.
> 
> There are two possibilities to implement that:
>  (a) Turn 'libtextstyle' into a module which, additionally, requires an 
> explicit
>      version number e.g. gl_LIBTEXTSTYLE([0.20.5]).
>  (b) Leave module 'libtextstyle' as it is, and define a new module
>      'libtextstyle-0.20.5' that does what you need. Likewise for
>      'libtextstyle-optional'.
> 
> Since (a) is not backward compatible

(a) can easily turned into something compatible by using the version number
of the current API as the default requirement.  Besides, in the context of
gnulib, backward compatibility is less of a problem, since there's an
explicit act from the user to move forward.

(b) does not seem to scale very well, unless you really believe that there
will be no need for more version numbers.

So I don't understand why you prefer (b), but I can perfectly live with this
solution.

> and also not the way the modules libsigsegv,
> libunistring, libgmp work, I would prefer (b).
> 
> But it would require that you change bison's bootstrap.conf. Would that be OK
> with you?

Sure!  That is fine with me.

How do we proceed?  Who does what?

Cheers!