Re: ISO C11 issues for glibc

[Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>]

> There should be no technical changes between N1570 and the final standard, 
> since the DIS was approved in ballot with no comments.  (ISO rules mean 
> that N1570, the DIS with diff marks against the previous draft, is public 
> but N1569, the DIS without those diff marks, isn't.  Unfortunately I don't 
> think there's a version of the DIS with diff marks relative to 
> C99+TC1+TC2+TC3, although N1548 was such a version of the previous draft.)

The one I looked at was N1516, linked from a citation on Wikipedia.
But now I notice that it also has a link to N1570:
	http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1570.pdf

> Maybe it makes sense to put features in one at a time, starting with the 
> feature test macro for C11 - and then if by the 2.15 branchpoint, whenever 
> that is, this optional feature hasn't been implemented (whether or not the 
> C11 support is otherwise complete), put in __STDC_NO_THREADS__ before 
> making the 2.15 release.

As Ulrich has just announced he intends to declare 2.15 this week,
I think that all of this should wait for 2.16.

> (The Santa Clara WG14 minutes (N1375) say "Ulrich would prefer that this 
> feature be made optional. He does not want to use it, and doesn't want to 
> be required to implement it.".  So that's one starting point for a 
> presumption that other C11 features are going to be less controversial 
> than this one.)

While I concur that these interfaces don't look all that useful, I don't
see any reason not to implement them given how easy it is to do so and that
doing so at the API level need not add anything to the ABI.  But I'm sure
Ulrich won't be shy in telling us if he objects to doing that.


Thanks,
Roland