[Ffmpeg-devel] [PATCH] Staticising mpeg12data header

[Rich Felker]

On Wed, Sep 20, 2006 at 08:47:40AM +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-09-20 at 01:00 -0400, Rich Felker wrote:
> > No. I don't care whether there are many OS's with similar mechanisms.
> > It's not part of the C language and thus it's an OS-specific hack.
> 
> The C language spec isn't even meant to cover everything relevant to
> creating real programs.

The _language_ is, just not the standard library. You never need a
construct that is not valid C to write real programs. On the other
hand, POSIX does cover everything relevant to creating real programs
and also (quite wisely) does not specify such nonsense as visibility
because it's a _language_ issue. Making it an OS issue is a misguided
attempt to work around a bad choice of binary format and to deprecate
static linking.

> A while ago you were ranting about how standards bodies should only
> formalize something after it's existing practice. Now you're complaining
> about existing practice that isn't formalized enough for your taste.
> Make up your mind.

This statement is utterly stupid. Visibility is outside the scope of
C, just like threads and processes and filesystem structure is outside
the scope of C, and just like digital storage units are outside the
scope of SI. A unix ABI standard like SVR4 is totally welcome to
include such things, but I have no respect for ABI standards because
all they do is tie you down to a particular implementation and
facilitate shitty binaryware.

Rich