>Patches are often criticized for ridiculous reasons. After we posted our patch to the Vim-dev mailing list, the first reply was: >>NOTE: Don’t use ANSI style

>Patches are often criticized for ridiculous reasons. After we posted our patch to the Vim-dev mailing list, the first reply was: >>NOTE: Don’t use ANSI style function declarations. A few people still have to use a compiler that doesn’t support it. >Seriously? C89 is a quarter-century old. The number of people stuck on older compilers can be counted on one hand. This is a non-concern. Still, I acquiesced. It was easier to make the change than argue with the critic. I laughed in agreement with the author at "Seriously?" I seriously can't imagine who uses a compiler almost as old as I am. But then I started thinking: I respect OpenBSD, C compilers, Vim for supporting many platforms for a long time; that's a programming task I've never approached. I use Ruby in my business, and don't care about supporting anything but Heroku! So: what's it like contributing to Vim or OpenBSD, which has a neato-torpedo list of esoteric supported platforms[0]? Who are the esoteric users, what do they do, and how do they do it? It'd help me empathize, and not dismiss off-hand their complaints. [0] http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html