linux programming-related mailing list?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at mindspring.com>

|   any recommendations for mailing lists devoted to linux programming?

There are many, each with a different focus.  Many end in -devel.

| p.s.  my interest was particularly in the library call strtoul() to
| translate a string to an unsigned long, and extending that to handle
| suffixes for kibi-bytes and mebi-bytes, as in 4Ki or 8Mi, which i
| think would be enormously useful.  well, ok, it would be useful for
| *me*.

That function is defined by the ISO standard for C.  ISO's SC22 is the
committee responsible for it.  If you are in the US, your national
body used to be ANSI's X3J11 (I don't remember its successor).  I used
to be a member, but the US$350 annual fee (15 years ago?) got to be a
burden.  I participate (a little) through the Canadian committee.

I bet you didn't want to hear that.

Realistically, you don't want to change a standardized function like
that, you want to add a new one.  Otherwise you will break standards
conformance of implementations and break a bunch of programs written
to the standard.

Then the question becomes: who should "own" the new function?

1 Each package that uses the function could drag around a copy.
  This is the normal way functions work.

2 You could get the function adopted by some body that makes the
  function standard in some way and hope that each environment you use
  conforms to that standard

  - ISO C 200X (and C++, I guess).

  - POSIX

  - SUS3

  - LSB (is that part of their mandate?) or some other LINUX standard

  - glib

  - some nice bag-of-tricks library

  Getting this adopted isn't a sure thing.  Even if adopted, it could
  take years.  Once adopted, it takes time for systems to conform to a
  standard.  It may be the case that some system you care about never
  conforms.

Programming is the least of these problems.  Approach 1 is by far the
most pragmatic, timely, and effective technique.  It should only be a
few lines of code.

Recommendation: write your function.  Use it for a while to see if it
really is a Good Thing.  Announce it somewhere and hope Google brings
you other customers.

Where to announce it is a good question.  Is there a nice
bag-of-tricks library that you could join up with?  Perhaps you could
look around sourceforge.