Re: [PATCH] Add support for uintmax_t type on FreeBSD 4.9

"David Syzdek" [off-list ref] writes:

On Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 9:30 PM, Junio C Hamano [off-list ref] wrote:
...

quoted

I have a stupid question.

Would it be a more appropriate improvement to do it like this:

       ifdef USE_THIS_AS_UINTMAX_T
           BASIC_CFLAGS += -Duintmax_t="$(USE_THIS_AS_UINTMAX_T)"
       endif

and then add a section for FreeBSD 4.9-SECURITY like this:

       ifeq ($(uname_R),4.9-SECURITY)
               USE_THIS_AS_UINTMAX_T = uint32_t
       endif

That way, an oddball 64-bit machine can use uint64_t here if it wants to,
possibly including FreeBSD 4.9-SECURITY backported to 64-bit ;-).

Your suggestion provides more flexibility for other environments. I
was making the assumption that 64-bit systems would define uintmax_t,
however in retrospect that would be unwise.
Would you like me to resubmit the patches with your modifications?

Actually there was a reason why I said this was a "stupid" question.  I
think your assumption on 64-bit platforms would hold in practice, and my
suggestion could be an unnecessary overengineering.  If nobody knows of a
system that would benefit from such a generalization, your original patch
would be better, partly because I think:

 (1) USE_THIS_AS_UINTMAX_T is just for demonstration of concept and is a
     terrible name we cannot possibly use in our Makefile.  We have to
     spend brain cycles to come up with a better name; and

 (2) It may be tricky to come up with autoconf macros to determine what to
     set USE_THIS_AS_UINTMAX_T to.

As a slightly unrelated aside, I find it somewhat unfortunate that the
conditional says "4.9-SECURITY", which is a bit too explicit and specific.
to my taste.  I do not know how FreeBSD versioning scheme works, but
wouldn't your change work equally well for 4.9-RELEASE or 4.11-RELEASE?

I suspect that you would want to say "$(uname_R) that begins with '4.' or
smaller needs this workaround", as strtoul(3) manual page seems to appear
first in FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE (but not found in FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE).