Re: [bug-diffutils] bug#24311: bug#24311: bug#24311: [PATCH] maint: accommodate LP64 systems

[Paul Eggert]

On 08/26/2016 12:46 PM, Eric Blake wrote:
> maybe it is time to
> propose a patch to the GNU Coding Standards that document the reality of
> existing systems

When we put that wording into the GNU coding standards many years ago, 
traditional C libraries were more important than 64-bit MS-Windows, and 
the reality was that one cannot easily write code that works with both 
64-bit MS-Windows and traditional C libraries that lack support for 
formats like %td. Although 64-bit MS-Windows is obviously more important 
now than it used to be in the good old IA-64 days, it's not obvious that 
we can jettison support for traditional C environments quite just yet.

Perhaps it wouldn't be to hard to change diffutils to be portable to 
nonstandard platforms like MS-Windows, while still maintaining 
portability to traditional C. The proposed patch won't suffice for that, 
though.