Re: [RFH] NetBSD 6?

> Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com> writes:
>
>>>  [OLD_ICONV]
>
>> It refers to the type of the second parameter to iconv(); OLD_ICONV
>> makes it take "const char *", as opposed to "char *", the latter of
>> which matches
>>
>>   http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/iconv.html
>
> I just wanted to follow up on this.  It turns out that the old POSIX
> standard was buggy (header file and function spec were different), and
> they resolved it in favor of non-const.  NetBSD followed the const way,
> and just now documented that with links to the standards email archives.
>
> Interestingly, GNU iconv 1.14 seems to define it as const also:
>
>   https://www.gnu.org/savannah-checkouts/gnu/libiconv/documentation/libiconv-1.14/iconv.3.html
>
> (which matches man/iconv.3 in the tarball).
>
> When I build libiconv-1.14, it produces a .h with const.  But it has a
> configure test to check if there is a host include file with const, and
> puts the const in the built header file or not to match!
> In include/iconv.h.in, there is:
>
>   extern size_t iconv (iconv_t cd,
>       @ICONV_CONST@ char* * inbuf, size_t *inbytesleft,
>        char* * outbuf, size_t *outbytesleft);
>
> Someday, it would be nice to have the configure test not fail an iconv
> implementation just because of the const, unless the presence of const
> is causing a real problem.  But I can understand that no one thinks
> that's important enough to get around to.