From: arne@vajhoej.dk   
      
   On 7/3/2025 6:31 PM, Craig A. Berry wrote:   
   > https://github.com/FreeTDS/freetds/blob/Branch-1_5/src/replacements/   
   > vasprintf.c   
   >   
   > does the following:   
   >   
   > #if HAVE_PATHS_H   
   > #include    
   > #endif /* HAVE_PATHS_H */   
   > . . .   
   > #ifndef _PATH_DEVNULL   
   > #define _PATH_DEVNULL "/dev/null"   
   > #endif   
   >   
   > FreeTDS is relying on autoconf to sort out whether paths.h is available   
   > and will only include it if HAVE_PATHS_H is defined in config.h, and   
   > thus only defines _PATH_DEVNULL if it's known not to exist. Obviously   
   > one should avoid making up one's own reserved identifiers and clobbering   
   > documented and well-known names, but that's not really the same thing as   
   > providing an implementation for one that's known to be missing. This   
   > fallback approach could of course be added to Arne's implementation if   
   > desired; to me it seems a lot cleaner than defining yet another macro,   
   > which would need to be defined in terms of _PATH_DEVNULL when it exists   
   > but otherwise not.   
   >   
   > The problem for VMS is that the workaround doesn't work.  Or at least it   
   > didn't when I was first porting FreeTDS 20+ years ago because the CRTL   
   > at the time did not recognize '/dev/null' as a valid path.  I believe   
   > recentish CRTLs (maybe VMS 8.x and later?) do have special case code   
   > that translates it to the native null device.  But that wasn't   
   > available, so I added the following line to the template from which   
   > config.h is generated on VMS:   
   >   
   > #define _PATH_DEVNULL "_NLA0:"   
   >   
   > The main advantage of this approach is that it worked, and it did so   
   > with a one-line change to a file I was already maintaining. I didn't   
   > have to sprinkle '#ifdef __VMS' in files that already existed and were   
   > already working on other platforms. I didn't have to create a lot of new   
   > files, the presence of which in the repository I couldn't test without   
   > autoconf/automake, which I didn't have access to at the time.  All of   
   > which meant upstream maintainers were far more likely to accept my changes.   
      
   So you are saying that for the code to work on *nix then I need   
   to keep those, because having it defined in config.h is a non-*nix   
   thing and for *nix it only set HAVE_PATHS_H which requires the   
   include in this file?   
      
   I will update.   
      
   Arne   
      
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