Re: cpp problem found by imake

[Marc Espie <espie at quatramaran dot ens dot fr>]

In article <20000503001156.C29519@wolery.cumb.org> you write:
>I'm going to have to ask you what X11 is _really_ trying to achieve
>here, because this seems utterly perverse, and I'll bet there's a
>simpler and more portable way.  I've got XFree 4.0 source lying
>around, but I can't find the place where it does this.

You realize that this is not really acceptable.

There are literally hundreds of projects out there that use imake.
Some of them are reasonably old, and poorly maintained.
Some include fairly large Project.tmpl files.

Moreover, no-one really wants to dive into those imake files unless
they must (I've recently fixed three large projects that use imake to
work on OpenBSD: openview, Wnn, and canna, and I would rather avoid doing
that again).

This is really a hard problem. The old preprocessor is used for old
crummy stuff. Imake is used in weird, hard-to-understand, bad ways.
I don't think anyone really want to have to fix this stuff... even more,
most people don't know how to fix it. I'd wager it's harder than the
__asm__ constraints that egcs fixed.

I can understand you not wanting to drag problems like that into gcc,
but killing such old behavior means that most projects won't have no choice
but to keep two versions of cpp around.

How about some compatibility mode, just so that imake and friends can continue
working as they did ?