I have testers for SCO Unix using GCC 2.95 (!), as well as VMS and z/OS. The latter has a vendor supplied C89 compiler but no GCC at all, nor is it likely to get GCC particularly soon.
I personally don't see having variables at the top of functions as a big price to pay for continued portability to a much broader range of systems (esp if dfa is supposed to move to Gnulib where C89 is still supported, or do I misunderstand?). There are people who really cannot use anything but the vendor-supplied compiler on whatever legacy systems they're running, and there are lots of legacy systems in production use out there. The 2-line rearrangement of includes, if it doesn't affect grep, would be a nice favor to me also. But on both counts it's the decision of the grep maintainers, as it's their code. (I maintained a private copy of dfa for 8 years; I can continue to do so if need be.) As to gawk moving to git + gnulib, I sincerely appreciate the offers of help. I am reading up on both. I have promised Jim to be open-minded about both and will make a decision once I have enough information and understanding to do. Thanks, Arnold
