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Re: Fixincludes
- From: Jonathan Wakely <jwakely dot gcc at gmail dot com>
- To: Jeremy Huntwork <jhuntwork at lightcubesolutions dot com>
- Cc: gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Tue, 29 May 2012 00:25:03 +0100
- Subject: Re: Fixincludes
- References: <4FC40806.3070904@lightcubesolutions.com>
On 29 May 2012 00:19, Jeremy Huntwork wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm endeavoring to understand the history and purpose of the fixincludes
> script. The README-fixinc states that the purpose is to fix
> ANSI-incompatible headers which 'many vendors supply'. Is this really still
> the case? Certainly by now this is very rare and corner cases should really
> be fixed in the upstream packages...
The "upstream packages" might be a third-party OS vendor who supply
their own compiler and have no interest in supporting GCC. Even if the
OS system headers get changed, that doesn't help users who have the
unchanged version (e.g. someone wanting to build GCC on SOlaris 9
isn't helped by a change in Solaris 11). New OS releases frequently
include changes that need to be worked around (e.g. FreeBSD recently
started using C++11 attributes in their system headers, which GCC
doesn't support yet.)
> Is there a reason to still run this script today when building gcc?
Yes, definitely.