Re: Re: How is it possible ???

On Saturday 08 January 2005 08:22, Alec wrote:
>
>     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 outdated or somesuch ).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.

Also, (normally it's hard to find out if someone went out of his/her way) even 
if a dev is willing to help, these kinds of bugs are often extremely hard to 
diagnose. And that's only the bugs comming from broken compiler behaviour. 
Besides there are still people that use (normally not filtered) what I call 
silly flags. These are flags that are not appropriate for a general level. 
They are clearly stated in the info/man page as being so.

Examples are:
*) -fno-rtti, this has no use for, C, but in c++ disables a part of the
      languagefeature that is extremely usefull, and not uncommon either.
      Setting this globally will break many c++ programs.
*) -ffast-math, this is more subtle, but some programs do depend on accurate
      floating point math according to the IEEE specifications. Fast-math will
      break this.
*) -fno-exceptions, a similar C++ feature, that can be used in normal c++
      control flow, not only in exceptional cases. This also can only be
      disabled on a program basis when exceptions are not being used.
*) Many others

The normal suggestion for these (or very difficult flags) is: "Get sane flags, 
try again, and see whether it works" If it does, the user is suggested to 
drop the flags. If there is a known broken flag normally one does just state 
that.

Paul

ps. There are also very hard packages like glibc/xorg-x11 that are very 
fragile, have optimization dependend bugs, and that might trigger compiler 
bugs by uncommon code. Those are normally heavilly filtered to ensure that 
these important packages build easilly and (Even more importantly, don't get 
build wrongly but unnoticed, fucking up your system)

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: [email protected]
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net

--
[email protected] mailing list