Re: Backporting to 4_0 the latest friend bits

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Michael Matz wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Kriang Lerdsuwanakij wrote:
>
>
> > Sure, this code compiles with 4.1 and 3.4 but doesn't compile with 4.0.
> > Although the code is valid, I'd bet it doesn't work the way the
> > programmer of the above code (or other 99% who doesn't track
> > the standard closely) would expect.
>
>
> What I would find ideal under these circumstances is that the patch which 
> made it work in 4.1, _if it's not too intrusive_, be included in 4.0, even 
> if it doesn't fix a regression in the strict sense.

I agree; that's why I asked to see the patches.  I completely agree that 
this situation represents a regression from the user's point of view, 
even if technically the compiler wasn't doing the right thing before. 
I'm perfectly willing to consider patches to fix the problem.

At the same time, if the code in question doesn't mean what the person 
who wrote it wants it to mean (e.g., if it implicitly declares classes 
in the scope of the friendly class, rather than nominating other classes 
as friends), then that code should still be fixed.  It's certainly in 
the long-term interest of KDE not to have spurious friend declarations 
around, and I'd expect that as a KDE distributor you would want to 
encourage them to use the syntax that means what they want, even in 
parallel to possibly fixing the compiler.

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery, LLC
mark@codesourcery.com
(916) 791-8304