Re: declaration of strptime

["Steven M. Bellovin" <smb%cs.columbia.edu@localhost>]

On Wed, 9 Jan 2008 18:19:31 -0500
Thor Lancelot Simon <tls%rek.tjls.com@localhost> wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 10:10:18PM +0000, Steven M. Bellovin wrote:
> 
> > The specific problem is that these packages simply followed the
> > Linux instructions to "#define _XOPEN_SOURCE"...  And between the
> > autoconf stuff and the pkgsrc stuff, I can't really tell what's in
> > effect here -- all I'm certain of is that strptime() was not being
> > declared properly until I patched the #define.
> 
> The Linux instructions are, to put it gently, stupid.  They're telling
> anyone who wants to use the strptime function that they should define
> a feature macro that *disables* anything in the namespace not
> specified by X/Open -- this is almost certainly not what's wanted.
> 
I won't dispute that...  What I am suggesting is that our documentation
give the right information.  A quick grep through man1 and man3 shows
*nothing* that gives the right information.  While I'm not suggesting
that our man pages substitute for a C manual or the various standards
(though of course, back in the mists of time the C manual did come with
the system...), given that there is different -- and wrong --
information out there perhaps we should do better...  (There isn't even
a man page for featuretest.h, and that's NetBSD-specific.)


                --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb