Re: [RFC] Suggested ways to remove the need for xm-go32.h

[Christopher Faylor <me at cgf dot cx>]

On Thu, Sep 23, 2004 at 01:20:48PM -0400, Michael Chastain wrote:
>Christopher Faylor <me@cgf.cx> wrote:
>>I guess the thing that sticks in my craw is the continual need to stand
>>on our heads to accommodate that one theoretical system that just might
>>not work as required.
>
>Yes, that bugs me, too.  Especially because the "one theoretical
>system" is usually some closed source system with a closed source C
>compiler for building gcc.

Exactly.

>> We're talking about making architectural changes which have a simple
>> "will this work (yes/no)" criteria.  I, as a bad maintainer, would
>> certainly respond to queries of that nature.
>
>The problem is, for a lot of questions, it takes actual work to divine
>the answer.  For this question it's possible to look in the man pages.
>But other questions require people to actually build and run the
>software.  Questions such as: "can we dump the special sourceware
>version of expect and tell everyone to use the stock version",
>or "do we need all this AIX-specific cruft in the test suite".

That's a good point.  For this one particular question, however, it
should be easy to poll people.

>> I thought that fopen not working would be a pretty obvious problem with
>> a pretty obvious fix.
>
>Ah, I was a bit blind last night.
>
>If gdb has a wrapper-less fopen:
>
>  fp = fopen (filename, "rb");
>
>Then the obvious workaround on host ancient-unknown-unix is
>to keep it wrapper-less:
>
>  fp = fopen (filename, "r");
>
>I like wrappers better but it's not a big deal to me, wrapper-less
>is fine with me.

I guess the above assumes that fopen will return NULL and it will be
immediately evident what the problem is.  Hopefully that, at least,
is a good assumption.

cgf