Re: [PATCH 1/1] git-compat-util: add a test balloon for C99 support

Hi Junio & brian,

On Wed, 17 Nov 2021, Junio C Hamano wrote:

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

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Even MSVC, long a holdout against modern C, now supports both C11 and
C17 with an appropriate update.  Moreover, even if people are using an
older version of MSVC on these systems, they will generally need some
implementation of the standard Unix utilities for the testsuite, and GNU
coreutils, the most common option, has required C99 since 2009.
Therefore, we can safely assume that a suitable version of GCC or clang
is available to users even if their version of MSVC is not sufficiently
capable.

I am all in favor of this patch!

I like the direction, but ...

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diff --git a/Makefile b/Makefile
index 12be39ac49..22d9e67542 100644
--- a/Makefile
+++ b/Makefile

@@ -1204,7 +1204,7 @@ endif
 # Set CFLAGS, LDFLAGS and other *FLAGS variables. These might be
 # tweaked by config.* below as well as the command-line, both of
 # which'll override these defaults.
-CFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall
+CFLAGS = -g -O2 -Wall -std=gnu99

... as has been already pointed out, this part probably should not
be there.  It is not our intention to require gcc/clang, or to
constrain newer systems to gnu99.

Another data point in favor of dropping this: our FreeBSD CI build reports
a compile error with this:

	[...]
	archive.c:337:35: error: '_Generic' is a C11 extension
	[-Werror,-Wc11-extensions]
			strbuf_addstr(&path_in_archive, basename(path));
							^
	/usr/include/libgen.h:61:21: note: expanded from macro 'basename'
	#define basename(x)     __generic(x, const char *, __old_basename, basename)(x)
				^
	/usr/include/sys/cdefs.h:329:2: note: expanded from macro '__generic'
		_Generic(expr, t: yes, default: no)
		^
	1 error generated.

I verified in https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/pull/1082 that this
patch is indeed the cause of this compile error.

Ciao,
Dscho