[resend] Allow use of MAP_TRYFIXED for better mmap()

[Todd Vierling]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003, Dustin Navea wrote:

: as i said it was an example, but thanks for the flame

Well, at this point, "you're welcome," considering the copy you forwarded
back to the list was a private response.  Have you read the proverbial
netiquette handbook yet?  However, I am sorry for going off the handle in
this case.

See, I'm rather tired of this thread bringing people out of the woodwork
with excuses for violating decades of programming practice, with lame and
bloated runtime checks, when C preprocessor detection of OS features is
valid *even on Windows*.  It's rather trivial to say "this binary runs on
NetBSD 1.6.2 or newer; pick the other binary for compatibility with
1.6-1.6.1, but it will be slower" and implement a simple #ifdef check.  You
know, like saying "this binary is for Win98 or later; choose the other
binary for more features on Win2k and up".  Sound familiar?

"Keep It Simple, Stupid" is a very good motto.  Bending over backwards to
try to make one binary run on a dozen OS versions, while providing all
possible features of the newest OS release, is provably a maintenance
headache.  It has been done and it has been a pain; that contributed to the
invention of autoconf.

If you want to provide multiple levels of compatibility, provide multiple
builds and indicate what their build environments were.  Builds for older OS
releases simply get less features.  This doesn't even require multiple
machines; one compiler looking at multiple sets of .h and shared libraries
is enough.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv at pobox.com>