Problems with evolving feature test macros?

[Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 5:49 PM, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> On 03/11/2014 09:33 AM, Michael Kerrisk (man-pages) wrote:
>>
>> That weakens the whole idea of having a
>> range FTMs (as opposed to just _GNU_SOURCE, say), it seems to me.
>
> Exactly.  Those fancy feature-test macros are typically more trouble than
> they're worth.  They're mainly of interest to standards nerds, not
> developers.

So, you'd say always just define _GNU_SOURCE and be done with it?

>> I have no specific examples to cite.
>
> Likewise for most developers of portable software, which is why this is a
> non-issue for them.  Feature-test macros don't suffice for portable
> software, and typically aren't even helpful; they mostly just get in the
> way..

Well, given that perspective, why go through the current effort trying
to tidy things up/

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/