RFR: JDK-8160997 Solaris: deprecated <pwd.h> and <gid.h> interfaces should be replaced

[David Holmes]

On 15/07/2016 8:52 PM, Alan Burlison wrote:
> On 15/07/2016 07:28, David Holmes wrote:
>
>> Okay I looked further into the affect of this (I recalled we also use it
>> in a test to deal with a sigwait API issue) and see that it changes the
>> form of the function prototypes (and underlying implementation) so it
>> won't silently change anything.
>
> Yes, that's another one of the places it is used and for that and other
> places it changes the APIs provided from the draft ones to the
> standards-conforming ones. This is all the result of decision made back
> in Solaris 2.4 that we are still living with, although it will be
> addressed in future releases.
>
>> Looking further into this aspect I can't help but feel we should be
>> defining:
>>
>> _POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112L
>>
>> which would also fix the current problem and more generally make it
>> clear we are intending to use specific standard-based API's. But that is
>> going somewhat further than the scope of the current fix - and may run
>> into unexpected consequences (we've been somewhat lax at programming to
>> specific language and API versions).
>
> Actually you almost certainly don't want that. Asking for a specific
> POSIX version means exactly that, you'll get the APIs defined in that
> version and nothing else. If you are using non-POSIX APIs, they will
> disappear, because what you are asking for is an environment which all
> conforming POSIX implementations will provide, i.e. lowest common
> denominator. The implementation in the header files doesn't always match
> up with that 100%, but that's theoretically how it should work.

Well, I think we do ask for _XOPEN API's in places, but yes the mix of 
POSIX, XOPEN, SUSv3(?), other? is a somewhat tangled mess.

> My general advice would be to set the smallest possible number of most
> restricted-scope feature macros that you can to get the behaviour you
> want, which in this case is _POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS.

Ok.

Thanks,
David