Re: Discussion about why GNU/Linux system upgrades cause old programs to break

Eli Zaretskii <[email protected]> writes:

> You have been presented with several practical cases where this
> decision causes trouble to people who use GCC correctly.  And you
> still keep claiming that being able to "help" many more clueless
> people who couldn't have been bothered to RTFM to discover -pedantic
> somehow trumps that.  In what world can this be a valid stance?

In one in which the set of "several" is orders of magnitude smaller than
the set of "many more clueless people".

>> I do not object to the idea that -fpermissive might need to get featured
>> more prominently in the documentation.  That may well be true.
>> 
>> It may even be useful to emit a hint about it as I've stated elsewhere.
>
> I submit that the fact GCC currently doesn't is because GCC developers
> overwhelmingly think this is a non-issue.

Or because nobody thought to suggest it.

I haven't seen such a suggestion, until writing the very paragraph
you're writing this under.

Perhaps it occurred to others, and they found some reason against that I
haven't thought of.

>> But, as I've also stated elsewhere, I highly doubt that knowing about
>> -fpermissive would've actually saved many here.
>
> Why is that doubt even an issue in this context?  If there's something
> that can be done to enhance the documentation to help people in these
> situation, it should be done, full stop.

The doubt is not about whether to enhance documentation.  I agree that,
if documentation can be enhanced, it ought to be enhanced.

Indeed, I said "I doubt that knowing about -fpermissive would've
actually saved many there".  This doesn't mean I doubt that it's a good
thing to do, it means that I doubt it'd have achieved their goal.

The doubt is about the quality of programs that require -fpermissive: I
suspect that the chance of a program requiring -fpermissive not having
unrelated problems preventing their building or use is low.
-- 
Arsen Arsenović

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