Re: [PATCH] Remove more gcc extension usage.

Quoting Jan-Benedict Glaw <jbglaw@lug-owl.de>:

Because we want git to run on such systems, and asking to compile gcc first is too much to ask for.

There are still missing or broken C99 features in the current gcc: http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html

Why do we want to avoid C99 features broken in gcc? Because we want users to be able to compile git with today's gcc, and installing a different compiler (proprietary or even free) to compile git is too much to ask for.

Maybe if cvsup compiled with gcc, we would be using cvsup backend for git now. Or maybe cvsup would develop to take the niche currently occupied by git. But cvsup was written in Modula 3, perhaps a superior language compared to C. You would have to compile a Modula 3 compiler and a Modula 3 library just to be able to compile cvsup. The necessary software was free, but compiling it was not trivial. Let's see, where is cvsup now? How popular is it?

After all, it's a trade-off between ease of coding and ease of installing. Make coding too hard, and the developers will go elsewhere. Make installation too hard, and the project starts losing users. And who wants to contribute to an unpopular project?

Going all the way to strict c89 could be too much, but fixing initializers in a few places is a minor issue. Users of the Sun's compiler can expect us to do such changes, just like users of gcc would ask to fix a program that uses c99 features not yet available in gcc.

-- Regards, Pavel Roskin