Re: Bugs encountered updating GCC

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 10:06:21PM -0700, Paul Eggert wrote:
> Daniel Jacobowitz <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > However, that's not the whole story.  The old check also failed if there
> > were warning messages on stderr when preprocessing.  The new one doesn't do
> > that, by default.
> 
> Why is this a problem for you?  The programs compile, surely.
> 
> If memory serves, Autoconf changed because some preprocessors issue
> harmless warnings, and Autoconf was rejecting valid programs.
> 
> Are you merely trying to get rid of the warnings?  

There are two problems.  One of them is philosophical, the other is
technical.

GCC is built (in bootstrap mode at least, where we know the compiler
will be GCC) using -Werror.  It's been fantastically useful for
maintenance.  So headers which always generate a warning are harmful.

The other is, the warning is a deprecation notice.  Older versions of
autoconf, because of this different behavior, would not accept headers
that issues a mandatory #warning.  But now we end up using the obsolete
<malloc.h> on FreeBSD.

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer