libffi - updates needed?

[Steve McIntyre <steve@einval.com>]

Hi,

I'm looking through the archive for packages using libffi. There's a
problem with libffi and variadic functions that has been recently
fixed - see

  http://lists.debian.org/debian-arm/2012/03/msg00108.html

for more information. So far, we only expect symptoms to show up on
armhf *but* it might be more widespread. Until recently, libffi didn't
support variadic functions properly. That's now been fixed in libffi,
but there's an extra API call necessary in places where variadics are
used.

Looking at gcc-4.6 and gcc-4.7, I can see that the embedded copies of
libffi are too old for this fix. I don't see a build-dep on
libffi-dev, whish suggests that they're using these embedded copies
rather than the system version. A couple of questions here: I'm
curious why this is? If it's definitely necessary, could we update
those embedded copies to a more recent libffi with the change
included?

Even beyond that, there are quite likely to be changes that would need
to be made in the gcc source to use the new ffi_prep_cif_var()
function. My scan of the archive shows ffi_prep_cif() shows up / is
used in:

 gcc-4.6
 gcc-snapshot
 gcj-4.[467]

at least. Can you help please? 

-- 
Steve McIntyre, Cambridge, UK.                                steve@einval.com
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