[sane-devel] SANE 1.1.0 Release discussion

[Julien BLACHE]

Alessandro Zummo <azummo-lists at towertech.it> wrote:

>  proprietary unices can't use gcc or another C99 compiler?
>  Which unix in particular?

Pretty much all of them ship compilers that do not implement C99 or do
not implement all of it yet. Moreover, we're speaking of systems that
often do not get updated for a variety of reasons, so you can't rely
on a recent compiler being installed or even available.

In my experience it's actually pretty easy to make one of these
compilers barf on what you'd consider "standard C code".

Moreover gcc is not always an option for various reasons, one of them
being the support contract linked to the machine. Another one would be
the total pain that is a gcc+binutils build.

>  I'm pretty tired of those proprietary closed source things that
>  we don't even know of and that are preventing us to improve.

Next time you'll say that for the BSDs.

Portability can be seen as a burden, I see it as a mean to learn a few
things along the way and make the code better. It also teaches you not
to rely on things that make life easy for you as a programmer. That
saved me already :)

JB.

-- 
Julien BLACHE                                   <http://www.jblache.org> 
<jb at jblache.org>                                  GPG KeyID 0xF5D65169