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Re: using plugin and lto: problem linking c-pragma symbol


On Wed, 1 Jun 2011, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:

> In my view, you are talking of the mythical
> ModularGCC project,

While there is a serious problem with a lack of reviewers reviewing 
modularization patches (such as Joern's patch to avoid target.h including 
tm.h, now in its fourth ping 
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2011-06/msg00307.html>), it's anything 
but mythical.

> which should be a mega-patch,

Nonsense.  It should be hundreds, maybe thousands of separate incremental 
patches.  While, for example, there shouldn't be an exactly one-to-one 
conversion of the 716 remaining target macros into hooks, 716 patches 
would be a much more appropriate conversion than one mega-patch.

> and I never saw it on
> gcc-patches@ so far.

Then you can't have been paying attention to gcc-patches over the past 
decade.  There have been thousands of patches cleaning up some aspect of 
compiler internals rather than directly changing the compiler's behavior, 
and many of those have been improving modularity.  If you want 
modularization, insulting all the people who have been working on it by 
calling their work mythical is not the way to go about it, and nor is 
complaining about the lack of modularization.

Instead, demonstrate the utility of plugins by writing plugins to do such 
things as understanding inter-header dependencies and working out what 
source files actually depend on what headers, or automatically assisted 
conversion of target macros to hooks.  (I'm not convinced plugins are the 
best tool for this, but I'm sure appropriate tools would help.  So if you 
wish to be an effective advocate for plugins, stop talking about them in 
isolation and produce real self-contained modularization patches to GCC 
that can be reviewed on their own merits - then explain how the use of 
plugins was what allowed you to produce a hundred 1000-line patches in a 
day, and to revise the whole hundred-patch series quickly in response to 
review comments.  Once you have concrete plugins of real use in improving 
GCC, the patches to GCC to allow those plugins to be used will be of a lot 
more interest.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com


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