[GRASS5] Re: Contents of grass5 digest, Vol 1 #501, portability

[Bernhard Reiter]

Hi Scott,

as with any Free Software we cannot stop people extending GRASS
or solving tasks with it in general. Anybody can develop something 
for GRASS.  These things eventually turn out to be
interesting and sometimes just end up in a repository or even the 
GRASS CVS.

This has happened to GRASS a lot. So there is a lot of cruft.

Right now our approach is relaxed for this reasons.
If we find the time to clean stuff up, we do it.
In general most developers only have access to their own 
development platform.

So we see ANSI C89 with a unix or GNU/Linux-conforming standard.

If you submit software Marcus guidelines are currently the best way
of doing it. It would be fine if you stick to POSIX standards
and make sure that your code runs with gcc on GNU/Linux systems.

This is why abstract standard don't work that well (in practice).
Most project make sure that the code actually runs on the systems that
active developers are using.


On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 10:34:03AM -0600, Scott O'Donnell wrote:
> I'm relatively new to the developers list, although not new to using 
> and programing with GRASS.  I think I'm beginning to appreciate the 
> difficulty of supporting so much software on so many different OS's.  
> 
> While reading the discussions on 'portability', various writers
> advocate the need to support their favorite OS and the variants
> of C that the OS decision requires.  While reading these discussions 
> and opinions about what should or shouldn't be supported, a presistent 
> question was raised in my  mind.  
> 	What is the least level of portability that is required?   
> 
> Has the GRASS development team decided to support software to 
> BSD-4.3 standards?  ANSI standards?  POSIX (1 or 2) standards? or 
> simply K&R?  
> If this were better understood or described, perhaps the recent 
> discussions of what functionality MUST be supported would be moot.
> 
> Is there a document that describes what level of portability must 
> be provided other than Marcus' list of guidelines to follow when 
> submitting software?
> 
> Thanks for helping me understand this issue,
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