Removing -frwitable-strings

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

In my GCC 3.4 status report, I mentioned that there is an open
regression in GCC 3.4 relating to -fwritable-strings.  We have made a
conscious decision to remove features relating to "traditional", and
this option is one such feature.

Therefore, I think that we should probably just remove this option in
GCC 3.4.  Kelley Cook has a patch for GCC 3.3.3 to deprecate this
option, and Zack Weinberg has a (somewhat out of date) patch to remove
-fwritable-strings from the mainline.

Richard Earnshaw suggested that we could deprecate the feature in GCC
3.4, and just not fix the bug.  That's a plausible alternative, but I'd
prefer just to completely eliminate the feature.

The implementation of this feature is particularly unfortunate; rather
than being handled entirely in the front ends (as it could be), there is
actually logic in several of the back ends to deal with it.  It was
quite surprising to me to see how much code Zack could remove by getting
rid of this option.

Zack raised the idea of removing -fwritable-strings back in April, and
nobody objected -- but we never followed through.  So, here is a final
chance:  Does anyone object to the plan of (a) deprecating
-fwritable-strings in GCC 3.3.3 and (b) removing it in GCC 3.4?  If so,
why?

-- 
Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com>
CodeSourcery, LLC