Re: Re: How is it possible ???

Paul de Vrieze wrote:

>On Friday 07 January 2005 06:57, Patrick Audley wrote:
>  
>
>>On Thursday 06 January 2005 04:46, William Kenworthy wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>Have a read of the ebuild - compiling gentoo with your own choice of
>>>optimisations is is almost a myth!  There's been some interesting
>>>threads about the predominance of flag filtering and how it often seems
>>>to be used with little cause.
>>>      
>>>
>>I have a hacked gcc-config profile that calls a perl script for all the gcc
>>executables that forces my cflags to be what I want and aside from ten
>>packages on my entire system I'm able to run without any problems.  That
>>includes X (though not glibc).  I think strip-compiler flags might be a
>>good idea for some systems but clearly on mine it's not necessary.
>>    
>>
>
>While I certainly won't stop you from doing this, please keep in mind that 
>there might be rather subtle bugs (depending on your cflags) that occur.
>Also the current gcc streams (every release gets better) can and will produce 
>broken code for certain uncommon code/flag combinations. For example sse2 
>support is known to be an issue esp. with the older versions, but the newer 
>versions also aren't perfect. As people use different compiler versions on 
>different architectures (i386 is the best tested/most bugfree), many ebuilds 
>need to be a bit conservative and filter out more common flags that are 
>broken for this package.
>
>Paul
>  
>
    I would note, that not all(most?) devs are willing to work on bugs 
when you went out of your way to strip out the protections that they 
left in place.  Some of them are necessary, some are probably not ( 
outdated or somesuch ).  The problem then becomes when you have a bug in 
the system thats app related, is it due to the app, or due to your 
compiling flags?  Obviously some bugs are easy to spot where there will 
be no correlation, but especially relating to app crashes and system 
stability, it's not easy to figure out.


-- 
Alec Warner
Spartasoft Secretary ( spartasoft.msu.edu )
Junior Computer Science
Michigan State University
[email protected]


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