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Date: Sun, 17 Oct 2004 00:44:56 -0400 (EDT)
From: Garrett Wollman <wollman@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu>
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To: obrien@freebsd.org
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cc: arch@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Proposal to restore traditional BSD behavior in <strings.h>.
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In article <20041017011608.GA6140@dragon.nuxi.com> you write:
>On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 02:32:02PM -0400, David Schultz wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 16, 2004, David O'Brien wrote:
>> > I'd like to restore the traditional BSD behavior that <strings.h>
>> > includes the content of <string.h> in addition to the BSD bcmp, et. al.
>> > We changed our <strings.h> between 4.x and 5.x and now that we're at
>> > 5-STABLE I'm finding software that built fine on 4.x has an issue on 5.x.
>> 
>> It has been this way for 2.5 years, and nobody has complained
>> until now AFAIK.  Therefore, it seems unlikely that there's enough
>> affected unportable software out there to justify undoing the
>> efforts at reducing namespace pollution now.
>> 
>> Moreover, there's a *lot* of pollution in string.h, where as
>> strings.h has very little.  Polluting strings.h again increases
>> the chances that portable applications that use strings.h will
>> break due to naming conflicts.
>
><strings.h> isn't POSIX.

BZZZT!  Wrong, but thanks for playing.  See XBD6 page 331.

However, it is an XSI header, and we don't claim to support XSI, so
theoretically we can define anything we want in <strings.h>.  I
believe, however, that it has been a better policy to force-migrate
users of the functions specified in the C standard to the header
specified in the C standard.

-GAWollman