Re: [PATCH 1/2] MinGW: Use pid_t more consequently, introduce uid_t for greater compatibility

From: Sebastian Schuberth <sschuberth@gmail.com>
Date: Dec 30, 2009, 01:16 UTC
Message-ID: <bdca99240912291716g74c35f22r7599f2c254fb1b09@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <40aa078e0912291655m57ea0081vddf3b64bf27e1d02@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 01:55, Erik Faye-Lund <kusmabite@googlemail.com> wrote:

Show 10 quoted lines

>>> Why this? Compatibility with what? What's the problem with the status quo?
>>
>> I wanted to include Hany's Dos2Unix tool (hd2u) into msysGit. h2du
>> depends on libpopt, and either of the two requires the uid_t type, I
>> do not recall which. And while adding the missing uid_t, I felt it
>> would be right to actually use uid_t / pid_t in the function
>> prototypes.
>
> Perhaps I'm missing something here... why do you need to modify the
> git-sources in order to include an external tool?

Because I'm building that external tool in the msysGit environment. As you know, the way we include external tools (like vim, unzip etc.) to the msysGit distribution is to create release.sh scripts that download the sources, apply patches, and build the tool. Patching the original hd2u sources to include compat/mingw.h was the best way that I saw to get some required symbols, with only two symbols missing, and those missing symbols are added by my patches.

Anyway, IMHO the correct declaration of e.g. getuid() is not "int getuid()", but "uid_t getuid()" etc. So even if the uid_t type was not required, it's a good change I think.

-- 
Sebastian Schuberth