Re: egcs, PATCH to fix warnings in gperf generated files ...

[Mark Mitchell <mark at markmitchell dot com>]

>>>>> "Kaveh" == Kaveh R Ghazi <ghazi@caip.rutgers.edu> writes:


    Kaveh> 	I disagree.  Clutter warnings distract people from
    Kaveh> real ones, and also encourage people to partially or

I understand this point.  But, fixing gperf should take all of a very
few minutes, if you have the source.  Somewhere, it needs to put out
some `0's instead of just closing curly braces, right?  Then, the
problem would be solved for good.  You can submit the patches to
Bruno, and I'm sure that the gperf patches could be made available on
the EGCS ftp-site.  

I'm not quite sure as to the future of gperf; on my system it comes
with a `libg++-devel' package, which I didn't really want to install
since I'm not doing libg++ development.  Eventually, I hope it will
become a stand-alone tool.  Perhaps that's what Bruno will do with
it. 

    Kaveh> 	To the extent that I can remove clutter warnings
    Kaveh> without a serious technical downside, it provides value.
    Kaveh> My patch removes a few hundred warnings with only a couple
    Kaveh> of two liner patches.  So I think its well worth it.

But, your patches are a hack.  Editing machine-generated code is
tricky.  For example, a new version of gperf might change it's
formatting in some way that breaks your scripts.  You just can't be
sure.  

I just don't think that, in contrast to most of the warning cleanups,
this is good software engineering practice.

    Kaveh> 	Agreed.  Once gperf is fixed, and we are using it I'll
    Kaveh> certainly remove the workaround code.

But, you might forget.  Or you might have moved on to greener
pastures.  I mean no insult; sepaking from experience, it's extremely
hard to remember to remove a hack, and sometimes career-changes happen
suddenly.  :-)

    Kaveh> 	I do intend to follow up on gperf, even if my patch is
    Kaveh> installed.  Do you have an address for Bruno which is known
    Kaveh> to work?  Is he simply on vacation? :-)

Unfortunately, I have only `haible@ilog.fr', which I think you have,
too.  I'm not aware of his whereabouts.

This issue is probably not worth us arguing further about; we've
staked out our positions pretty clearly, and made our arguments
reasonably cogently, I think.  I'm happy to let the maintainers decide
at they see fit.

-- 
Mark Mitchell 			mark@markmitchell.com
Mark Mitchell Consulting	http://www.markmitchell.com