add strnlen to libiberty (was Re: Assembly output optimisations)

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Tue, 7 Aug 2012, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 2:30 AM, Hans-Peter Nilsson <hp@bitrange.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just don't forget that libiberty isn't a target library anymore.
> > To wit, the (GCC) run-time exception is moot for that code, AFAIK.
> > Maybe enough reason to abandon that rule so its code can be
> > truly and freely shared between GNU projects.
> 
> The libiberty licensing is certainly confused.  I just don't want to
> make it worse.

I think the natural way to sort it out is to move all the FSF-copyright 
files therein (including include/) to GPLv3, no license exception, except 
for cp-demangle.c (used in libstdc++-v3) and the headers it includes, 
which should have the GCC Runtime Library Exception notice.  libiberty is 
a library for a limited number of GNU projects, all under GPLv3; as far as 
I know the only reason it hasn't been converted to GPLv3 is that noone got 
around to doing so.  (gnulib also uses the practice of putting GPLv3 
license notices on the files even if they are also available under other 
licenses, with separate metadata indicating other licenses under which 
files are available.)

That wouldn't sort out the question of what "This file is part of" notices 
should be present, but would deal with the other license confusion.

(Ideally I think most of libiberty would be replaced by use of gnulib in 
the projects using libiberty - I see no real advantage to the GNU Project 
in having those two separate libraries for substantially the same purposes 
- but that's a much larger and harder task, which would also involve, for 
each libiberty file replaced by a gnulib version, ascertaining whether 
there are any features or local changes in the libiberty version that 
should be merged into the gnulib version or any common upstream such as 
glibc.  And some files in libiberty would probably need adding to gnulib 
as part of such a project.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com