Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!ark1!nems!mimsy!mojo!mojo!djm From: djm@eng.umd.edu (David J. MacKenzie) Newsgroups: gnu.utils.bug Subject: Re: Tiny bug in GNU getopt, and multiplication of sources Message-ID: Date: 3 Jan 90 08:22:40 GMT References: <8912310022.AA20600@kovic.IRO.UMontreal.CA> Sender: news@eng.umd.edu (The News System) Distribution: gnu Organization: University of Maryland Lines: 30 In-Reply-To: mcgill-vision!iros1!pinard@EDDIE.MIT.EDU's message of 31 Dec 89 00:22:35 GMT In article <8912310022.AA20600@kovic.IRO.UMontreal.CA> mcgill-vision!iros1!pinard@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Francois Pinard) writes: > GNU getopt does not declare the functions alloca nor index. Function > alloca should return void *, and index should return char *. This > particular getopt was part of grep 1.5, but I do not feel like > reporting this as a grep bug. I fixed that on the master copy recently. New releases of GNU programs should automatically include the change (see below). > Most of them originated from GNU emacs, I believe; but comparing the > same routine in various products reveals that they slightly differ for > reasons not pertaining necessarily to the product in which they stand. Actually, they all are in fact symbolic links to the same copies of the source code at the MIT AI Lab, but you obviously can't do that in a distribution tar file. The reason you see slightly different versions of various GNU library files is that the distributions of those different programs were not made all at the same time; thus, they each got a copy of whatever happened to be the current version at the time that they were released. When new versions are released, they will automagically get the new current versions of the library files. In the case of grep 1.5, Mike wanted to minimize the size of the diffs from previous versions, so he did not include the current getopt.c, or update the copyleft messages to use the subroutinized GPL; but that is an exception . . . . -- David J. MacKenzie