Re: Portable type definitions for tools

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 03:14:57PM +1000, Luke Mewburn wrote:
> We would have to be very careful in the porting effort to ensure that
> the AC_TYPE_* macros we obtain from autoconf 2.60 don't depend upon
> other changes made since 2.52.

I am aware of this.

> Then we'd also have the future maintenance issues.

This would be made obsolete when updating to 2.60+, so maintainance
shuold be low.

> What particular portability problems are you trying to fix
> with these proposals?

I want to make sure that we get correct types if at all possible.
Other than the requirement of the compiler to support C90 and a 64bit
type, nothing should be needed. This is currently not the case.
tools/compat also doesn't ensure the presence of some of the modern
types like intptr_t and intmax_t and I expect we either already use them
in some places or will soon use them.

If the consensus is that we can live with the current state, this can
wait. Nevertheless the question of which autoconf version we want to use
remains. Given that this is a maintainance tools, the exception clauses
are likely good enough for us.

Joerg