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

[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:

On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 3:31 AM, Johannes Sixt [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

Gary V. Vaughan schrieb:

quoted

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)