Hi Zack, On 2/10/21 5:05 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote: > On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 10:53 AM Alejandro Colomar (man-pages) > <alx.manpages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On 2/10/21 4:38 PM, Zack Weinberg wrote: >>> >>> I don't know about anyone else on the glibc team, but I personally >>> consider the entirety of <sys/queue.h> to be provided only for some >>> degree of backward compatibility with old applications that were >>> ported from BSD; new code should not use it. I'd *like* to formally >>> deprecate it, but I expect that would cause too much breakage to be >>> viable. Anyway, I hope you can understand why I'm not interested in >>> messing with its contents at all. >>> >>> (Can we add a statement to the effect that new code should not use >>> <sys/queue.h> to all of the related manpages, please?) >> >> Would you mind explaining your reasons for the deprecation? Performance? > > No, portability and reliability. The contents of <sys/queue.h> are > not consistent among the various operating systems that offer it, and > some versions have outright bugs. About portability, I guess you are referring to the fact that some systems don't provide some of the newest macros? Such as OpenBSD not providing SIMPLEQ_LAST()? About bugs, I don't know which, but considering that the BSDs use these macros, I guess they'll fix whatever new bugs they find. But for those that offer macros of the same family (with the same name), I guess they all offer the same interface, don't they? > >> What functions/macros should be used instead of the queue.h macros? > > In C, I think applications are better off implementing these simple > data structures themselves. In any other language, the standard > library probably has something built-in with a more stable and > probably also more ergonomic API. If you need to have a high performance linked list, yes, probably it pays off writing your own. But for a prototype or some code that isn't critical, having a libc interface that already provides (somewhat standard) linked lists is great, IMHO. Nevertheless, as Michael said back then, if there's consensus in glibc deprecating these, we could add that to the manual pages. But as you said, it's quite difficult to remove those macro sets now, as they have been used for many years. However, there's still libbsd providing them if glibc deprecates them, so it may be possible. Thanks, Alex > > zw > -- Alejandro Colomar Linux man-pages comaintainer; https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/ http://www.alejandro-colomar.es/
