[sane-devel] Replacing u_char and friends (was Re: [PATCH] Port to OS X)

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Devs,

Olaf Meeuwissen writes:

> Hi Luiz, Devs,
>
> Luiz Angelo Daros de Luca writes:
>
>> Olaf and Yurii,
>>
>> The sys/type.h problem is the same I face while compiling with musl
>> instead of glibc.  There are just some files that miss it. I have a
>> patch for them but it still misses the ifdef around it.  Check the
>> other patches that might easy your port.
>>
>> https://github.com/openwrt/packages/blob/master/utils/sane-backends/patches/
>
> I looked at the 030-musl.patch and except maybe for the backend/hp*.c
> files, all fixes seem to involve u_char and friends.  Now, ./configure
> checks for their presence.  If they are absent, they will be defined
> automatically for you in include/sane/config.h.  If they are present,
> these defines are not provided and whoever uses them will need to add an
> #include for a header that does, normally sys/types.h.  However, that
> header may be absent itself, so ... 
>
> Somehow, I get the impression that ./configure is only doing half of
> this job.  On the other hand, (blindly?) including sys/types.h in the
> config.h file seems pretty heavy handed too.  Moreover, that file may
> not be there.
>
> Now, if the issue is just u_char and friends, can't we just simply avoid
> the whole issue and replace them with "unsigned char" and the like?  For
> all I know that ought to work everywhere.
> A similar suggestion was made (way back) on StackOverflow[1].
>
>  [1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1918934/is-u-char-a-standard
>
> Grepping for the ones that ./configure checks for (SANE_CHECK_U_TYPES in
> acinclude.m4) with:
>
>   $ git grep -wE 'u_(char|short|int|long)' master | wc -l
>   2084
>
> that would be quite a monster patch though.  Would such a patch be
> acceptable?

Following private communication with Luiz, I've decided to use his
030-musl.patch rather than replace u_TYPE with unsigned TYPE in all of
the sources.

When C libraries change their includes or someone tries to build with a
previously unused C library we will probably get to fix up another few
files that are getting a "free ride" through an implicitly included
<sys/types.h> somewhere.  We'll just keep playing whack-a-mole.  :-|

Hope this helps,
-- 
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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