[Xapian-discuss] Xapian 1.1.5 (release candidate for 1.2.0) released

[Olly Betts]

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 07:48:54AM +0200, Jean-Francois Dockes wrote:
> OSF DCE is not exactly Unix gospel. If I remember well it was a failed
> initiative in the 90s from HP, IBM and DEC to counter Sun NFS which was a
> bit too open for their taste. I think Microsoft took up parts of it for
> DCOM. So it's a standard, in the sense that there is a document that
> describes it. 

I don't know its history, but I'm not sure I want to get into a discussion
of standardisation anyway.

Really the key point here is we need to try to deal with the world as it is,
not as POSIX (or indeed other standards) say it should be.  Being formally
specified isn't a bad thing of course.

> I'm really not an expert on DCE, but, by the way, I had a quick look at the
> document and it seems that the specified interface is actually the one
> implemented on FreeBSD, uuid_create().
> http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9629399/chap2.htm#tagcjh_05_02_08
> There is no mention of uuid_generate() on the OpenGroup site.
> 
> Apparently uuid_generate() replaced uuid_create() in implementations at
> some point, maybe someone on the list knows why ?

I have no idea.

> Anyway, this is not to suggest that you change the code, just trying to
> indicate that uuid_generate() does not appear universal, and that it is
> reasonable to handle it as a portability issue.

I'm not disagreeing.

>  > Not sure a configure argument is needed - we should be able to just probe
>  > for each interface and use whichever we find.
> 
> I just meant that, in the case that the DCE uuid_generate() interface was
> installed as a port (e2fsprogs), it will be found in /usr/local, not
> /usr. It would appear reasonable that the configure script makes an effort
> to look for it in there in addition to /usr.

Generally it's expected that the user tells configure if they want other
places than the defaults searched.  I guess ideally we'd use pkg-config
to find it - I assume ports handles that sanely.

> Probing for the specific FreeBSD interface is another thing, part of the
> effort above.

But if we look for and (if found) make use of the UUID API which FreeBSD
provides, then finding the e2fsprogs version in /usr/local is no longer
relevant.

Cheers,
    Olly