qsort_r argument order

[Dustin Lang <dstn at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

Hi,

Apologies if this has come up before: it seems the mailing list archive 
search program can't handle search words with underscores in them.

I suppose this comment is coming too late, but I really wish that the 
qsort_r function had been done differently.  As far as I can tell, qsort_r 
is not part of any standard, but it exists in BSD (including Mac OSX). 
For some reason that I can't comprehend, when it was added to glibc the 
argument order was permuted.

glibc:

extern void qsort_r (void *__base, size_t __nmemb, size_t __size,
                     __compar_d_fn_t __compar, void *__arg)
  __nonnull ((1, 4));

BSD:

void qsort_r(void *base, size_t nel, size_t width, void *thunk,
             int (*compar)(void *, const void *, const void *));


Why?!  As far as I can tell, the functions would otherwise be compatible. 
Especially annoying is the fact that it still compiles -- it's only at 
runtime that it explodes in a fiery mess.  As the developer of a software 
package that uses qsort_r and has to run on BSD and glibc, this is just a 
pain in the @$$.

Argh.  Time to add a bunch of stupid preprocessor QSORT_Rs to my code.

cheers,
dstn.