Re: ok problems with gnome-core now ...

[Bruce Stephens <b stephens isode com>]

Havoc Pennington <rhpennin@midway.uchicago.edu> writes:

> You are supposed to mention them [non-portable things]. Now someone
> can fix it.

It would be possible, with some work, to use the TenDRA system
<URL:http://alph.dra.hmg.gb/TenDRA/> for checking this kind of thing,
at least for C bits.

The TenDRA compilers allow you (require, even) to explicitly specifify
APIs.  So, I know that the etags which comes with XEmacs-20.4 (with no
special symbols defined) uses only things provided in ISO C and posix,
because this succeeds:

	% tcc -c -Yposix etags.c

The catch is that the C producer is the most well-developed (the C++
producer lacks libraries, and there's no Objective C at all), and
there'll be lots of things that are kind of reasonably portable, but
not actually in any of the APIs supplied with TenDRA.

Not that the latter is necessarily a problem: describing the relevant
APIs explicitly would probably be useful generally (for the LSB
project, too, I'd guess).