[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Bug#203722: How to handle the -mieee SIGFPE problem in normal Debian packages



On Mon, Feb 09, 2004 at 04:54:06PM +0100, Dominique Devriese wrote:

> Please respect the Mail-Followup-To, as I'm not subscribed to this
> list, and the discussion is relevant to #203722.

> I'm currently looking at the following bug report
> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=203722
> about a frequent SIGFPE on an alpha machine.  I guess we all know the
> cause of this bug, namely the non-standard alpha FPU semantics.

> My question is about how to handle this bug:
> IIUC, there are the following options:

> 1 Fix upstream FP calculations to not trigger SIGFPEs. this is
>   unfortunately not an option imho, because of lack of interest of
>   developers.
> 2 make all KDE programs install a SIG_IGN SIGFPE handler.  This can be
>   done in kdelibs, and would be little work.
> 3 make upstream configure detect alpha and compile with -mieee if so.
> 4 wait for the gcc alpha patch to be included into gcc, which was
>   posted on this list recently.

> What option would you suggest the Debian KDE packages take ?  I don't
> think there is any very FP-intensive code in the KDE packages, so
> performance is not really that much of an issue.

Even if gcc will soon adopt a patch to make -mieee the default, there
will be older versions of gcc around for a while.  This is a bug *now*,
and there's no reason not to add the -mieee explicitly to the compiler
flags for the time being: it will just become a no-op later once this is
the gcc default.

If you prefer to integrate this into the upstream configure rules,
that's fine, though it's trivial to do it in debian/rules instead (see
pseudopatch on one of the other bugs).

-- 
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer

Attachment: pgppaLUrYx1Dd.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: