[FFmpeg-devel] [PATCH] IPv6 support v.2

[Rich Felker]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 06:20:24PM +0100, Fran?ois Revol wrote:
> > for other OSs its similar IMO, the "tradition" of providing every 
> > missing
> > standard function in every application is just idiotic
> 
> It's just what "porting" means... believe me I had much harder things 
> to port already.

"Porting" is a word I consider harmful. There's a reason we have
portability standards like ISO C, POSIX, etc. and their counterparts
for other languages: it means you can rely on a reasonable amount of
standard interfaces across fairly diverse systems with possibly very
different internal implementations of those interfaces based on the
requirements of the platform.

Certainly there will always be some things that need system-specific
implementations, but having an OS gratuitously omit important
already-standardized interfaces so that every app has to supply its
own is just lame. Note that lots of times when apps do this, their
supplied version is actually BUGGY.

I ran into this issue (buggy app-included implementations) with bash
just yesterday: because my system does not have the GNU asprintf
function, bash insisted on using its own entire printf replacement
rather than implementing asprintf on top of the (standard) snprintf.
And of course they got it wrong, so bash's printf(1) with the %x
format was printing 0x80000000 as -80000000...

Rich