hi

Imagine a software library with a fancy interface for doing some kind of URL
operations. It is highly portable. It builds and runs on numerous platforms.
To be able to do that, it has several internal solutions that overcome
differences in the operating systems.

Now, there's a tiny application that wants to use that library. It too wants
to run on very many platforms.

Would it be nice for the library to supply an interface to some of the very
portable functions that strictly speaking isn't part of its job? If the
library wouldn't supply the functions, the application would be forced to
duplicate some of the function and thus the same kind of code would appear
twice...

Let's say there were functions for printf()ing, reading environment
variables, comparing case insensitive strings and similar.

My gut reaction is of course that no, the lib should only offer relevant
functions. But then when I consider the amount of stuff I have to add to the
application that already exists in the library, it makes me dubious... :-)

So share some of your wisdom friends, I'm all ears!

-- 
   Daniel Stenberg - http://www.contactor.se/~dast - +46-705-44 31 77
   ech`echo xiun|tr nu oc|sed 'sx\([sx]\)\([xoi]\)xo un\2\1 is xg'`ol