RE: Porting gcc to HP Nonstop Ux

[Jim Wilson <wilson at tuliptree dot org>]

On Fri, 2003-05-02 at 01:21, praveen wrote:
> 1. Regarding the problem with the redefinition of __STDC__, I had used
> the following tm_file for my system(have attached the same).

I am looking at current gcc sources.  Patches that add ports to old
compiler sources are not very useful, as they won't be accepted.

__STDC__ is a built-in macro.  The compiler defines it for you.  Trying
to define it in SPECS in your tm_file is wrong.  Note that no other mips
port is doing this.

__STDC__ is just defined.  It isn't supposed to be given a value, there
is no justification for that in the ISO C standard.  Since gcc is always
an ISO compiler, __STDC__ is always defined.

Trying to reproduce exact behavior of the system compiler here is
wrong.  The only reason why you would care about this is if you have
trouble with system header files.  But in that case, the right solution
is to use fixincludes to make the system header files work with gcc.

Neil Booth is one of the preprocessor maintainers.  If I am saying
something that conflicts with something he said, then he is probably
right.

> 2. Another question that I had is once a successful port is done, how do
> we declare it to gnu.

Send patches against the current sources.  The patches will then be
reviewed, and may require changes before they are accepted.  We need
copyright assignments from all authors for all significant changes
before we can add them to our sources.  A new port is a significant
change.  Plus we need copyright disclaimers from the employers.

We need copyright assignments from everyone that contributed to the
port.  There is a name tom.bates@compaq.com at the top, so it looks like
at least one other person worked on this port.  If it isn't possible to
identify every person that worked on the port, then you probably need a
corporate copyright assignment instead of personal copyright
assignments.  And that would have to be from every corporation that had
employees that contributed to the port.

Send gcc patches to a gcc list. Binutils patches to a binutils list. 
Etc.  After patches are approved and have valid copyright assignments,
they will be added to the development sources.  At some later time they
will appear in a release.  Gcc is on a roughly 6 month schedule, so it
may be that long before an installed patch appears in a release.

Some info about contributing can be found here:
	http://gcc.gnu.org/contribute.html
Some info about starting the assignment process is here:
	http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2003-04/msg01512.html

Jim