On Tue, May 03, 2016 at 11:11:44AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2016-05-02 15:02:44 -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> > The difference is the OS is using M_, and such short prefixes are
> > common for OS-level libraries.
> 
> That's really the worst thing that they could do. The reason is that
> public non-OS library headers should not use reserved names (because
> they are reserved), so that the best thing they can do is to use long
> prefixes to avoid clashes between them. Thus, applications should use
> only short prefixes (for private use) in order to reduce the risk of
> clashes with these library headers (due do chains of inclusions, they
> don't always know what headers are used). And this is what they often
> do in practice.

I don't think this makes any sense, Vincent.  POSIX is littered with
such short prefixes, such as S_ for stat, O_ for open flags, etc..

> > What is the likelihood that you'd find a conflict in a library
> > that's meant to compile with Mutt, or which Mutt itself requires
> > to compile? Methinks pretty slim... :)
> 
> But that's not impossible. This wouldn't be the first time a new
> library takes a name already used by an application, with a possible
> future dependency.

Nothing is impossible, in the world of software.  But I think this is
so unlikely that I highly doubt it's worth worrying about.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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