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

Richard Stallman <[email protected]> writes:

> Now that I know what the context was for that back-and-forth, I have
> to agree with the words I think are Eli's: with 5 >s or 3 >s.
>
> Even if we agree that that particular deviation had become a bad idea
> to use, reporting it as an error and making compilation fail is harsh,
> and causes trouble for the users of GCC.

For this particular deviation, not reporting it as an error or not
making compilation fail also causes trouble for the users of GCC.

Mis-compiling a program is also harsh.  In fact, arguably, quite a bit
harsher than producing no program.

> I think there are kinder ways to guide the users to change that code.

Please be specific.

If you're alluding to warnings: GCC had been emitting warnings for at
least 20 years at the time when the change was made.  The change,
indeed, was, for the most part, just promoting existing warnings into
errors.

The users have already changed that code.  The vast, vast, majority of
cases where these diagnostics are emitted are not intentional uses but,
rather, indicative of a bug.

Indeed, that's why these warnings were emitted by default since at least
2004.

Also, nothing was lost.  The page linked before details how to recover
old behavior.

This was already discussed in this thread.
-- 
Arsen Arsenović

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----

iQECBAEWCgCqFiEE/uKz0RP8AKMWLWBhUsKUMB6ixJMFAmqIfjgbFIAAAAAABAAO
bWFudTIsMi41KzEuMTIsMiwyXxSAAAAAAC4AKGlzc3Vlci1mcHJAbm90YXRpb25z
Lm9wZW5wZ3AuZmlmdGhob3JzZW1hbi5uZXRGRUUyQjNEMTEzRkMwMEEzMTYyRDYw
NjE1MkMyOTQzMDFFQTJDNDkzEBxhcnNlbkBhYXJzZW4ubWUACgkQUsKUMB6ixJOS
XgEAns0Fsf/5TQZ2g8IB8fe4hTIpZmlLdyZ08kzgCiGddI0BANq7Clb5Mnd6AfUt
/IvnLtWFg2Lzd1c8RaYSeOmzxBkE
=VK4x
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----