[gs-devel] 'private' define going away

[Ralph Giles]

All,

I believe we have informal agreement for this, so consider this a 
notification. Next week I will replace all instances of the 'private'
define with the equivalent C 'static' keyword. I will also remove
support for -DNOPRIVATE from the build.

The reasons for this are as follows:

* All supported compilers now support the static keyword.
* History suggests building with -DNOPRIVATE has been broken
  for periods of several releases over the last few years,
  support for static has not been a problem in practice.
* 'private' is a C++ reserved word, so our use is one of the
  obstacles to compiling Ghostscript as C++.
* Removing this non-standard idiom  makes our codebase more
  readable and accessible.

If you have a problem with this decision please let me know before 
September.

 -r