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Re: [alpha, hppa] GCC-4.3 as the default compilers for lenny?



On Sun, Mar 23, 2008 at 08:11:31PM +0000, Matthias Klose wrote:
> > >   This will last up to the lenny release, and the toolchain is to be
> > > freezed next week. So I don't ...
> >   ... think you'll have to support that patch actively for too long.
> 
> wrong, once released with the patch you'll get bug reports for the
> compiler with the patch applied.  For every report you need to recheck
> with a compiler without this patch.  If you do want to do that until
> lenny+1 is released, please go ahead.

  So that everyone can follow at home, the discussed patch comes from
the GCC people themselves[1], and for having read the thread, it appears
that nobody was against the patch, that introduce an -mcld option so
that people can force gcc to emit a CLD before functions that use string
operations (stos and friends).

  All that is done in the current patch in Debian is to not let it be a
gcc CLI switch and to be active by default. If you look at the patch, it
merely reinstate the prior GCC behaviour which has a probability 0.0001
to generate surprising code as it's what it did prior to that. Of
course, without this patch, GCC has a 0.9999 probability to generate
code that would break if string ops are used in an interrupt handler,
but if I read that comment right, since we know where those bugs come
from, we don't care about them ? Is that it ?

  I would have argued that prodding GCC people to include the patch
would have been time better spent than arguing about its inclusion in
Debian. Debian is probably not the sole distribution that will need a
behavior overlap on this one. And if all you need is a release team
member to maintain the patch, then okay, I will do that, I can deal with
x86(_64) asm.

  But unlike others that doesn't seems to care a lot about which
compiler is default in lenny, I would be sad to not see gcc-4.3 our
default compiler. It comes with a lot of enhanced warnings and error
checking, that I've seen in action, and hence know to be worthwhile (the
array bound checking e.g. is really nice). And the g++ strictness wrt
headers is important to have, else code developed on Debian would need
porting to work on other distributions. I believe Debian to be an
excellent development platform, and we should not lag behind wrt stable
development tools.

  [1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2008-03/msg00417.html

-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org

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