Proposal to restore traditional BSD behavior in <strings.h>.

[David O'Brien]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2004 at 02:32:02PM -0400, David Schultz wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 16, 2004, David O'Brien wrote:
> > I'd like to restore the traditional BSD behavior that <strings.h>
> > includes the content of <string.h> in addition to the BSD bcmp, et. al.
> > We changed our <strings.h> between 4.x and 5.x and now that we're at
> > 5-STABLE I'm finding software that built fine on 4.x has an issue on 5.x.
> 
> It has been this way for 2.5 years, and nobody has complained
> until now AFAIK.  Therefore, it seems unlikely that there's enough
> affected unportable software out there to justify undoing the
> efforts at reducing namespace pollution now.
> 
> Moreover, there's a *lot* of pollution in string.h, where as
> strings.h has very little.  Polluting strings.h again increases
> the chances that portable applications that use strings.h will
> break due to naming conflicts.

An application using <strings.h> is only portable across BSD's.
<strings.h> isn't POSIX.  I totally don't understand why we made a
<strings.h> that is incompatible with our BSD breathern.

-- 
-- David  (obrien at FreeBSD.org)