[m-dev.] [m-users.] Closed source Mercury projects on Windows

[Julien Fischer]

On Wed, 6 Jun 2018, Zoltan Somogyi wrote:

>>
>> IIRC, we only use that copy of getopt for systems that don't provide it.
>
> I believe you are right. I am not sure, but I *think* I added that copy of getopt
> to the runtime for that purpose when I was providing scaffolding code for
> projects to my students in whatever subject I was teaching at the time.
> The scaffolding was the uninteresting part of the project's code, which
> the students thus did not have to spend time to write. They thus did not
> write it in umpteen weird and wonderful ways, which saved *me* time
> when marking the projects.
>
> The department's machines always had GNU tools installed on them and
> thus had getopt, but some students worked on projects at home (or at their
> own workplace, if parttime), and some of *their* systems did not have getopt.
> So I included a copy of GNU getopt with the scaffolding code, and made it
> a modified copy with renamed functions and global variables in the interface,
> so that it wouldn't clash with the standard copy of getopt if it *was* installed
> on a computer a student was using.
>
> That was twenty years ago. Now, we should just assume that the system provides
> getopt, and delete our copy. Unless someone knows of a current Unix/Linux/BSD/???
> system that still lives in the dark ages?

I suspect the only user may be the MSVC port; my Windows machine is at
work, so I can't check until tomorrow.  *If* we do need to include it
then we can replace the GNU implementation with the NetBSD one.

Julien.