Re: [patch 02/15] const-expr.patch

From: Gary V. Vaughan <git@mlists.thewrittenword.com>
Date: Apr 25, 2010, 08:38 UTC
Message-ID: <20100317060108.GB27121@thor.il.thewrittenword.com>
In-Reply-To: <32541b131003161643g1a1cbf6ck3089ae5fb016a985@mail.gmail.com>

[It seems like all my replies to this list don't make it through, even though I'm able to post a new thread. Please forward on my behalf.]

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 07:43:54PM -0400, Avery Pennarun wrote:

Show 20 quoted lines

> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 3:31 AM, Johannes Sixt <j.sixt@viscovery.net> wrote:
> > Gary V. Vaughan schrieb:
> >> Unfortunately, there are still plenty of production systems with
> >> vendor compilers that choke unless all compound declarations can be
> >> determined statically at compile time, for example hpux10.20 (I can
> >> provide a comprehensive list of our supported platforms that exhibit
> >> this problem if necessary).
> >
> > Yes, a comprehensive list would be appreciated. This change is an
> > uglification that I personally would prefer to stay out of the code base
> > unless many consumers of git are hurt.
> >
> > The problem with this non-feature is that it is all too easy that new code
> > introduces new incompatibilities.
> 
> This is probably a stupid question, but why not just build it using
> gcc on systems with a broken vendor compiler?  You don't have to
> distribute gcc just to distribute binaries built with it, so it seems
> like there's no downside... and less suffering for the build
> maintainer.

More often than not the vendor compiler produces better code than gcc on any given architecture, and one of the features of the TWW package builds is that in the vast majority of cases we port the upstream code to build using the vendor compiler, because this is what our customers want.

Cheers,

-- 
Gary V. Vaughan (gary@thewrittenword.com)