Re: Trigraph warnings when compiling linux-2.4.0-prerelease1

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds at transmeta dot com>]

On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Joe Buck wrote:
> 
> > But hey, as good as you are at ignoring documentation, I'm sure you'll
> > have no trouble at all ignoring reality too.
> 
> Wow.  Can't you have a disagreement without making it so personal?  The
> documentation promised that the string "??)" would be interpreted as "??)"
> by default and as "]" if -ansi is given, and so it is.  No promise has
> been broken.

It's your calling it a "bug" that I object to, and that I found so damn
obnoxious. 

Linux uses a _lot_ of gcc extensions. This one happens to be one of the
better documented ones, in fact. More documented than the inline assembly
syntax etc stuff has historically been - the use of some of those features
was originally based largely on reading gcc sources because they were so
badly documented (and don't take this as a complaint - they're much better
documented now, and I can't afford to complain about other peoples lack of
documentation anyway as I'm personally not very good at documenting stuff
myself).

However, it's still the case that the gcc documentation actually implies
that gcc should not even _warn_ about trigraphs: the documentation I have
says:

       -Wtrigraphs
              Warn if any trigraphs are encountered (assuming they are enabled).

which certainly implies to me that even if you enabled "-Wtrigraphs", it
wouldn't even't cause a warning if trigraphs aren't enabled (and again,
it's documented that they are enabled by "-ansi" and by "-trigraphs" and
disabled by default).

Now, that doesn't mean that gcc people can't change their minds,
obviously. It may be that the documentation has been fixed up to match the
new behaviour too. I'm not saying that documentation and features can't be
changed. That's obviously fine, and often required by progress.

But what is NOT fine is to then complain about people that follow the
documentation as it used to be. That really gets my hackles up. I can
change the kernel sources, that's not the problem. But I don't want to
hear some holier-than-thou lecture from the prophet of ANSI about how the
kernel was bad just because the gcc documentation was changed from under
it.

		Linus