Re: Drop the K&R requirement from binutils?

[Jeff Law <law at porcupine dot slc dot redhat dot com>]

 In message <20020820112115.L20056@bubble.sa.bigpond.net.au>, Alan Modra 
writes:
 >To clarify:  Even if people notice K&R bugs, and complain loudly, but
 >no one is willing to spend the time to fix bugs, why should the burden
 >of supporting eg. HPUX fall to Nick?  Jeff hasn't even been willing
 >to put his name against HPPA in the maintainer's file!  To be fair,
 >that's not to say Jeff provides no support, but it's why I say we don't
 >have someone committed to fixing K&R bugs.
I'm willing to maintain those bits in maintenance-mode only.  ie, I can
fix problems as they arise, fix build problems as bits change in the
generic code, etc.  But any heavy lifting of the SOM bits will probably
have to be done by someone else.

Note the lack of mention of my name in the MAINTAINERS file is more a
matter of not noticing the binutils project had one and adding myself.

As for the K&R problems, I typically flushed them out of all the bootstrap
tools a couple times a year (the last round being about 9 months ago and
with another round due to start soon due to Red Hat needs).

 >> and everyone elses time.   No one compiles BINUTILS using a K&R 
 >> compiler! :-)
 >
 >That's probably not entirely true.  I suspect that anyone trying to
 >compile with a K&R compiler runs up against bugs, and decides that
 >it's easier to grab a copy of gcc than report and/or fix the problems.
 >Which of course is still a vote against K&R support being needed.
Also note that while folks may not have complained about ANSI/ISO
in binutils because they can get GCC to work -- they have complained
about ANSI/ISO stuff in GCC when trying to get it bootstrapped with the
vendor tools.

Jeff