Proposal: Making Debian compiler agnostic
Hello,
This summer, during the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), we have been
working to provide a way to rebuild the archive with a non-gcc compiler
(in our case: clang).
Our project's intent is not to change the default compiler, just use a
secondary compiler to generate more errors or warnings for package
maintainers to be aware of. In most cases, keeping both compilers happy
would result in higher quality code, something I think we can all get
behind.
During our work, we have found a few interesting issues, and would like
to push for some package policy changes for Jessie.
Currently, it is the case that some packages are expecting gcc and g++
to be the default and (almost) only C and C++ compilers. While it has
been the case for the early days of the project, this assumption causes
more and more issues for folks who want to use something _other_ then
gcc or g++.
A lot of packages featuring "NIH" build toolchains do not respect CC, in
a lot of cases. This will be the source of most of the problems, as most
autotool or cmake setups should respect CC.
As a next step, we would like to propose that all packages respect $CC
and $CXX, when set.
In cases where this is not technically possible, /usr/bin/cc or
/usr/bin/c++ should be used in place of /usr/bin/gcc or /usr/bin/g++,
although this is discouraged as well, and should not crop up often (if
at all), as doing this will make life very hard for cross-builders
The idea here is not so much for our project in of it's self, it is to
make sure we respect user-local configuration, or system-wide
configuration, regardless of what compiler that is.
We would like to propose the same approach for Fortran and Objective-C,
but it seems that it is not as clear as the C/C++ convention. If someone
could provide sane env-vars for these two, it would be very helpful.
We should also make the following assumption -- the CC / CXX compiler
will accept gcc compatible arguments, with only very minor changes that
are gcc compatible as well (such as using -O3 rather then the
meaningless -O6, etc). The clang compiler, for example, considers
incompatible arguments with gcc a bug.
Therefore, we would like to propose an update of Debian policy, to take
effect after the Wheezy release.
"4.9 Main building script: debian/rules"
stating:
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Hardcoded usage of CC or CXX (for example, CC=gcc) should be avoid and
documented if necessary.
Debian build tools must respect the CC and CXX variables if provided. If
not, they shall default to /usr/bin/cc and /usr/bin/c++
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If a rough consensus is reached it is our intent to make this into a
release goal.
Thanks,
Sylvestre Ledru and Paul Tagliamonte
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