bits/wordsize.h

[Ralf Corsepius]

On 04/18/2011 08:06 AM, Wolfram Wadepohl wrote:
> this is the time to jump into the discussion and open a more 'political'
> thread.
>
> Yes, Ralf is right. In theory. On the other hand Sebastien is right,
> because he wants to get a widely used part of software working on 'his'
> (i. e. our) RTEMS.

> The resulting question is IMHO essential for the future of RTEMS in
> industrial projects: How much non standard but widely used 'junk' do we
> adopt or allow? And how get we this done?

Well you can expect us to rucksack RTEMS with hacks to work around bugs 
in arbitrary applications.

Please check freetype's sources: As far as I can gather, what they are 
doing is to utilizes a non-documented, glibc private, internal define to 
derive some pointer sizes - This approach lacks generality and will 
inevitably fail somewhere.


As others previously said, this situation is far from being unusal. It's 
a bug in an application, nothing more, nothing less and nothing to fret 
about.

It's what system-integrators and packagers (esp. under Linux) deal with 
every day.

C.f. favorite OS's FLOSS packages and you'll find that many of these 
packages require patches, whose only purpose is to adopt packages to 
their OS's specifics, because the upstream maintainers did not take 
something into account.

That said: Providing upstreams with feedback about such issues (and 
possibly to send patches/fixes), is one of the foundations FLOSS is 
based on.

Ralf