ProPolice (was Re: libffi on OpenBSD x86)

[Joseph S. Myers]

On Wed, 20 Oct 2004, Joe Buck wrote:

> On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 12:57:34AM +0200, Marc Espie wrote:
> > As far as I know, Etoh Hiroaki has made a try, in the past, to see 
> > if ProPolice could possibly be integrated in gcc.
> 
> RMS has expressed a lot of interest in getting ProPolice or similar
> technology in (including beating us up a bit for not dropping everything
> and doing it).  There's mudflap, but that isn't really a good replacement
> (too much overhead).

Unfortunately ProPolice doesn't tend to get submitted in a form anyone 
wants to review.  Patches are sent as monolithic chunks with inadequate 
explanation; requests for changes or explanation are unanswered.  Patches 
are sent against releases and requests for patches against mainline 
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-09/msg00373.html> it seems are 
unanswered.

> I hope that it can be made to work.  It's always difficult to get a
> large, intrusive patch into a piece of software as big as gcc; the same
> is true of the Linux kernel or anything else.  What has worked in the
> past is to figure out if the patch can go in as a series of smaller
> chunks that are easier to analyze for correctness.

Such a division was suggested by Geoffrey Keating for this patch 
<http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2000-11/msg00099.html>, but I don't 
think a split patch was submitted.  If the patch authors showed 
willingness to engage in a general dialogue about the patch, its 
approaches, possible alternative approaches and parts that could be split 
off and submitted individually against mainline, rather than apparently 
just keeping resubmitting new versions that may or may not take into 
account some of the comments made but don't explain how they differ from 
previous versions and how they take previous comments into account if they 
do, it might be possible to make progress.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers               http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~jsm28/gcc/
    jsm@polyomino.org.uk (personal mail)
    joseph@codesourcery.com (CodeSourcery mail)
    jsm28@gcc.gnu.org (Bugzilla assignments and CCs)