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Re: cygwin build problem with m4 HEAD


From: Eric Blake
Subject: Re: cygwin build problem with m4 HEAD
Date: Fri, 09 Sep 2005 07:36:54 -0600
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According to Ralf Wildenhues on 9/9/2005 6:46 AM:
> 
> I hate runtime checks.  This one will mean hopeless complication of
> things, and worse results for any kind of cross compilation.  And all of
> this for a system where people are unlikely to run year-old
> installations anyway.  Besides, the workaround costs like what?  Two
> lines of code.  Multiply by a hundred for the test + replacement.
> 

True enough - to date, only newlib has been identified with the bug, the
bug is now fixed, and will show up in the next mingw and cygwin release.
Maybe you could be optimistic when cross-compiling and assume there is no
bug (since cross-compiling is hard enough that they are likely to have an
up-to-date version of newlib).  But if you don't want to do the runtime
test at all, it is somewhat your call as maintainer of the gnulib argz module.

> 
>>However, my employer has not signed a copyright disclaimer,
>>despite my repeated requests (although I'm making progress, and hope to
>>get it one of these days), and the amount of m4 magic needed to add a
>>runtime check and improve argz.c is most likely beyond the trivial patch
>>limits.
> 
> 
> I could attempt such a patch, but do not see its value outweighing its
> costs, see above.  In matters like these, I would _by far_ prefer a
> documentation of such limitations, in the spirit of the Autoconf manual.

Well, currently, neither gnulib/lib/argz_.h nor argz.c have documentation,
so that may be the best approach - just documenting all of the argz_*
functions, and stating that in the spirit of portability to older versions
of newlib, use argz_append instead of argz_insert(,,NULL,).  By the way, I
was also able to configure m4 with ac_cv_func_argz_insert=no
ac_cv_type_error_t=no to force the use of gnulib's argz module in
preference to newlib's system argz_* without even patching libtool.

> 
>>>     * libltdl/ltdl.c (lt_argz_insert): Work around newlib argz_insert bug.
>>>        * Makefile.am (VERSION_INFO): Bumped revision.
>>>        Reported by Eric Blake <address@hidden>.

So maybe this libtool patch can be applied as a bandaid to the current
cygwin 1.5.18, then in another year or so be reverted when all known sane
systems that provide argz_insert have correctly accepted NULL for a while.

- --
Life is short - so eat dessert first!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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