standards/188316: Visibility of ntohl etc. and POSIX 2008

[Jilles Tjoelker]

On Sat, May 31, 2014 at 11:35:43PM +1000, Bruce Evans wrote:
> I finally got back to this.

> On Sun, 18 May 2014, Jilles Tjoelker wrote:

> > On Mon, Apr 07, 2014 at 03:43:44AM +1000, Bruce Evans wrote:
> >> On Sun, 6 Apr 2014, Christian Neukirchen wrote:
> >>>> Fix:
> >>> Guard the definition with __POSIX_VISIBLE >= 200112.

> >> This is wrong too, and is inconsistent with <arpa/inet.h> where there
> >> the symbols are defined unconditionally (if this wouldn't be redundant).
> >> The correctness of this depends on the symbols being in a header that
> >> doesn't exist in versions of POSIX that don't have the symbols.  I
> > ...
> > So you propose to change the "#if !defined(_KERNEL) && __BSD_VISIBLE"
> > conditional to "#ifndef _KERNEL"? This affects only old versions of
> > POSIX (where <netinet/in.h> may not be included anyway) and non-POSIX
> > standard C (which does not define <netinet/in.h> either).

> > Note that there are other __POSIX_VISIBLE >= 200112 conditionals in
> > <netinet/in.h>, so the submitter's change may be more consistent, even
> > if it is somehow wrong.

> I see you committed a version that changed to a __POSIX_VISIBLE conditional.

> There were only 2 _POSIX_VISIBLE conditionals.  They were mostly for
> ipv6 things, so removing them won't expose many problematic symbols.

> I'm surprised POSIX had so much support for ipv6 in 2001.  The ipv6
> extensions are in mostly in netinet6/in6.h.  They are fairly carefully
> ifdefed, and of course are mostly spelled with a '6' to keep them
> separate from ipv4 names (which are mostly not spelled with a '4').
> Unfortunately, their namspace isn't very consistent.  POSIX reserves
> mainly IP6, IPV6_, IN6_, in6_, s6_ and sin6_ as prefixes, and still
> has special cases like sockaddr_in6 and in6addr_any where the '6' is not
> part of a prefix or not followed by an underscores.  FreeBSD extensions
> extend the mess, e.g., by using inet6_ instead of in6_ as a prefix for
> most functions.  POSIX avoided the corresponding mistake for ipv4 (the
> alternative spellings in_ and inet_) for the lower case versions, and
> avoided reserving INET6_ as a prefix (it is only used for special cases
> like AF_INET6).

I guess the _POSIX_VISIBLE conditionals are to allow matching RFC 1700
in strict C standard mode, or for compliance to IEEE 1003.1g-2000 (the
socket extension to POSIX.1-1996).

Both of these are obsolete, so support could be removed.

-- 
Jilles Tjoelker