Eli Zaretskii wrote: > I'm asking why get into such situations in the first place. What do > we gain?
In general, by using gnulib, you gain higher compliance to the POSIX and C standard. In other words, code that was written with these standards in mind has higher chances of working correctly with gnulib than without. In the particular case of 'wint_t': The problem is no such much that wint_t = 'unsigned short' is not unchanged by argument promotions, but rather that this type is not larger than 'wchar_t'. This piece of code wint_t c = getwchar(); if (c == WEOF) goto eof_handling; is only correct when wint_t is larger than wchar_t. The original definition of WEOF is (wint_t)0xFFFF. This is an unassigned Unicode character, but it can occur in files. You must not misinterpret it as being the end of the file or stream. It's like 20 years ago, when people were writing char c = getchar(); if (c == EOF) goto eof_handling; and were wondering why this was buggy. > As for fixing, the fixes are usually fragile and tend to break > whenever the system headers are rearranged, for whatever reasons. This is manageable. > > > Another scenario is when wint_t variables are passed to functions that > > > expect pointers to WCHAR data type used by the lower-level Win32 APIs > > > (LPCWSTR etc.) -- with the overridden type, this causes compilation > > > warnings or errors, and requires casts or intermediate variables. > > > > Can you elaborate on these, please? WCHAR = wchar_t != win_t. > > Not sure what you want me to elaborate on. With the native data > types, I can freely assign wint_t to wchar_t and vice versa; with the > overridden Gnulib type, I cannot. You CAN freely assign wint_t to wchar_t and vice versa: they are integer types. What you cannot assign freely is a wint_t* to a wchar_t* or vice versa. Which means that you discovered a bug in the source code of your package. There is NO STANDARD that would state that wint_t and wchar_t are of the same size. ""I have to port code that makes invalid assumptions. Gnulib detects that this code makes invalid assumptions. Let me complain about Gnulib."" Bruno
