First off, I’m sorry for implying that the current units are insufficient.  I 
just looked through our code and we’re using far fewer “external ‘c’” 
definitions than I thought we were.  The documentation generally looks good 
too, so I assume most of trouble was from not being as familiar with Free 
Pascal’s RTL layout and using search techniques that worked better for 
Delphi/Kylix than for it.  We had to maintain both FPC and Kylix code in 
parallel for several years too, and that undoubtedly made things more 
complicated than they would have been otherwise. I’ll keep that bias in mind in 
the future.

On 3/23/2017 2:40 PM, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> No-one has ever offered to maintain a Libc import unit. It was provided
> only as a courtesy to Kylix devs.

That's probably because the Wiki says:

"The libc unit is deprecated, and frozen in time for Kylix compatibility, and 
won't be ported to other architectures or operating systems."

It also has a long list of other reasons why the entire idea is flawed.  We had 
a rough port to both Linux64 and Darwin32 but never tried to submit those 
changes back for that very reason.

> That said, if someone steps up and offers to update Libc for all
> supported architectures, she/he is welcome.

This is another instance where you’re (possibly unconsciously) discouraging 
people from submitting patches.  By saying “update ... for all supported 
architectures”, you’re implying that adding Linux64 or Darwin isn’t worth it 
unless they also spend time on ARM, Haiku, and uclibc.  I certainly understand 
that from a idealogical point of view, but if someone doesn’t have the time or 
knowledge to cover everything, it does make it seem like a partial patch 
wouldn’t be welcome.  OTOH, maybe that is intentional, and I can’t say it’s 
wrong, since it does provide a high barrier to expanding the scope of that unit.

In any case, it’s not relevant for us now.  As I said, we recently removed all 
of our Libc.pas usage.

On 3/23/2017 4:29 PM, Marco van de Voort wrote:
> Could you name the mantis items with improvements/problems ?

No, though I’ll try to submit some for the cases where there could be 
improvement.  

The only thing I can think of that would have been retroactively useful is if 
Libc.pas had included deprecated declarations with messages saying where the 
replacement units/methods are.

— 
Zoë Peterson
Scooter Software
_______________________________________________
fpc-pascal maillist  -  fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org
http://lists.freepascal.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal

Reply via email to