nano @6.3: error: 'const struct stat' has no member named 'st_atimespec'

[SerpentChris (Chris Calderon)]

I'm trying to build nano on my PowerMac G5 running Tiger 10.4.11. That last version from a couple months ago built fine but the latest version does not build. It fails with a complaint about trying to access non-existing members of struct stat in file fstatat.c. I've attached my log.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

In file included from fstatat.c:48:
stat-time.h: In function 'get_stat_atime_ns':
stat-time.h:69: error: 'const struct stat' has no member named 'st_atimespec'
stat-time.h: In function 'get_stat_ctime_ns':
stat-time.h:82: error: 'const struct stat' has no member named 'st_ctimespec'
stat-time.h: In function 'get_stat_mtime_ns':
stat-time.h:95: error: 'const struct stat' has no member named 'st_mtimespec'
stat-time.h: In function 'get_stat_atime':
stat-time.h:121: error: 'const struct stat' has no member named 'st_atimespec'
stat-time.h: In function 'get_stat_ctime':
stat-time.h:135: error: 'const struct stat' has no member named 'st_ctimespec'
stat-time.h: In function 'get_stat_mtime':
stat-time.h:149: error: 'const struct stat' has no member named 'st_mtimespec'

Yes, I can confirm that on Tiger on Intel.

st_atimespec, st_ctimespec, st_mtimespec are the normal names for those stat members on macOS, and nano's configure script detects that. (GNU operating systems use different names for them.)

Looking in /usr/include/sys/stat.h, the stat struct will have those members unless _POSIX_C_SOURCE is defined.

I don't see anything in the nano build that sets _POSIX_C_SOURCE, however I do see -D_APPLE_C_SOURCE -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 being used, and in /usr/include/sys/cdefs.h I see that if _XOPEN_SOURCE is defined and great than or equal to 500, then _POSIX_C_SOURCE will be defined.

So the problem seems to be that when nano's configure script checked to see what members were in the stat structure, it didn't use -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 so it saw that st_atimespec et al were available, but then when it tried to compile the actual program it did use -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 which made st_atimespec et al unavailable. nano needs to use the same flags at configure time as it does at build time.

From config.log, it looks like -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 is coming from ncurses:

$ pkg-config ncurses --cflags
-D_APPLE_C_SOURCE -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 -I/opt/local/include

nano may be totally unaware that a dependency like ncurses could potentially add such a flag. It may be a bug for ncurses to be doing that. What do you think, Josh?