On Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 10:21:43PM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote: > > We unconditionally include <wchar.h>, and your system does not seem to > > have support for it built in. So why doesn't the `#error` trigger? It's > > also not like this is a recent error, it has been added with 581deed72 > > (The obligatory forgotten files..., 2002-05-06). > > > > We can do something like the below patch in clar, but I'd first like to > > understand why your platform seems to be broken in such a way. > > Yeah, this is definitely broken. We require ISO C99, and according to > the draft preceding the ratification[0], `wchar.h` and its contents are not > optional. The similar draft for C11 also doesn't appear to make these > optional. > > I think users of uclibc will need to compile it with full ISO C99 > support. I expect that a wide variety of other software will be > similarly broken without that. Perhaps, but...don't the current releases of Git work just fine on such a wchar-less uclibc system now? We don't use wchar or include wchar.h ourselves, except on Windows or via compat/regex (though it is even conditional there). This is a new portability problem introduced by the clar test harness. And even there I doubt it is something we care about (it looks like it's for allowing "%ls" in assertions). Our approach to portability has traditionally been a cost/benefit for individual features. Standards are a nice guideline, but the real world does not always follow them. Sometimes accommodating platforms that don't strictly follow the standard is cheap enough that it's worth doing. I think more recent discussions have trended to looking at standards in a bit stronger way: giving minimum requirements and sticking to them. Certainly I'm sympathetic to that viewpoint, as it can reduce noise. But IMHO this is a good example of where the flexibility of the first approach shines. We could accommodate this platform without any real cost (and indeed, we should be able to _drop_ some clar code). -Peff
