libstdc++ licensing

Posted May 8, 2013 9:16 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252)
In reply to: libstdc++ licensing by khim
Parent article: Stallman: The W3C's Soul at Stake

Sure, "using namespace nested" is problematic if you want to do, e.g., partial specialization of templates but these cases are extremely rare: I've built Gentoo system with thousand of packages after building gcc with --enable-symvers=gnu-versioned-namespace and only had couple of problems in places where things were broken by design (where people forward-declared things in std:: namespace instead of including proper header).

Oh, sorry, I take my words back: in reality it all was based on "inline namespaces", of course - my memory is just fuzzy. As this proposal claims "inline namespaces" functionality was added (under the "using namespace nested __attribute__ ((strong))" guise) more then eight years ago and is now supported on all Linux distributions (including such slow-moving as Debian or RHEL). I've used them in my work about seven years ago. Plain "using namespace nested" approach is even older, of course, but it's less compatible.