the old behavior of exposing nothing except plain ISO C can be
obtained by defining __STRICT_ANSI__ or using a compiler option (such
as -std=c99) that predefines it. the new default featureset is POSIX
with XSI plus _BSD_SOURCE. any explicit feature test macros will
inhibit the default.
installation docs have also been updated to reflect this change.
to deal with the fact that the public headers may be used with pre-c99
compilers, __restrict is used in place of restrict, and defined
appropriately for any supported compiler. we also avoid the form
[restrict] since older versions of gcc rejected it due to a bug in the
original c99 standard, and instead use the form *restrict.
this is legal since sa_* is in the reserved namespace for signal.h,
per posix. note that the sa_restorer field is not used anywhere, so
programs that are trying to use it may still break, but at least
they'll compile. if it turns out such programs actually need to be
able to set their own sa_restorer to function properly, i'll add the
necessary code to sigaction.c later.
this bug was introduced in a recent patch. the problem we're working
around is that broken GNU software wants to use "struct siginfo"
rather than "siginfo_t", but "siginfo" is not in the reserved
namespace and thus not legal for the standard header to use.
this implementation is superior to the glibc/nptl implementation, in
that it gives true realtime behavior. there is no risk of timer
expiration events being lost due to failed thread creation or failed
malloc, because the thread is created as time creation time, and
reused until the timer is deleted.
Rich Felker
Nicholas J. Kain