[tlbuild] -funsigned-char is not portable

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Wed, 3 Jun 2009, Jonathan Kew wrote:

> Surely the correct fix is to ensure that the code does not depend on whether 
> chars are signed or unsigned by default, as IIRC the C standard says this is 
> implementation-defined, and there's no guarantee that every compiler even has 
> an option to control it. If the code requires that char-sized variables are 
> unsigned, it should simply declare them as "unsigned char", not assume it can 
> rely on a compiler option.

Hi Jonathan,

you are absolutely right. But are you willing to check the bibtex8 code and
adapt it if necessary at this late stage of building for TL2009?

I'd love to have a small bibtex8 test case for 'make check', that would also
detect if the programs really depends on char being unsigned.

As I just started to write to Vladimir, this flag was present in the TL2008
version of Makefile.in for bibtex8.  When I translated that into Makefile.am
for TL2009 I first overlooked/forgot this flag and only recently
reintroduced it.

In other words, this flag was used in the TL2008 build and I dislike to just
drop it without further analysis.

So how to proceed?

Regards
Peter