Hello Alex, On Sun, 13 Sep 2020 at 10:29, Alejandro Colomar <colomar.6.4.3@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > Hi Michael, > > On 9/13/20 8:01 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote: > > Casting to long is the historical practice here, and should be sufficient, > > don't you think? I realize there's an argument for making all of these > > system data type casts intmax_t / uintmax_t. But the counterarguments > > (admittedly not compelling), are: > > I was casting to (long) until I accidentally met with a cast to > (intmax_t) in ftw.3 (now I realize it was the only one in all of the > pages; lucke me). Yep, that was a bit of a coincidence! > I saw there a good point in using those types and tried it to see what > you think about them. I still haven't sent you a big patchset with > s/(long)/(intmax_t)/ because I was waiting for this discussion :) :-). > > * Some people might still be confined to a pre C-99 world > > I guess that people are dealing with very special hardware/software > and can be trusted to understand what the C99 types are and which > pre-C99 do the job for them; intmax_t.3 might also help ;). > > If someone doesn't live in such a special world and just doesn't > know the types, it's a good moment to learn them. > > > * Churn (lots of changes) > > True ... But if changes are trivial enough, maybe a single big patch > can do it. Yes. > > * (long) is a sufficient cast for all of these types > > (except off_t). > > I don't like exceptions very much. Maybe someone sees (long) all over > the place and thinks 'long' is enough everywhere and misuses it. > > > Your thoughts? > > Your thoughts? Well, I said none of my arguments was too compelling... I think that I'd take one big patch. Perhaps first, could you send me an estimate of how many pages you think might be changed in the patch. Thanks, Michael -- Michael Kerrisk Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/
