Re: Gentoo vs GNU toolchain (was Re: [gentoo-dev] Replacing cpu-feature USE flags)

[Martin Schlemmer]

On Sat, 2006-07-08 at 08:20 +0200, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 07:50:27PM -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > On Friday 07 July 2006 19:04, Harald van Dijk wrote:

> > the ssp/pie/htb patches have their own USE flags so separating them from
> > USE=vanilla makes perfect sense ...
>
> I'm not disagreeing with that, but removing an older option is not just
> providing more choices.
>
> >                                     now you can do:
> > gentoo patches + ssp
> > gentoo patches + nossp
> > vanilla + ssp
> > vanilla + nossp
>
> gentoo patches + ssp
> gentoo patches + stub
> vanilla + ssp
> vanilla + stub
>
> > whereas before you only had the option of:
> > gentoo patches + ssp
> > vanilla + nossp
>
> gentoo patches + ssp
> gentoo patches + stub
> vanilla
>
> > like i said in my previous e-mail, forcing stubs onto people even when
> > USE=vanilla *is by design* because i got tired of people who had no clue
> > about the consequences throwing USE=vanilla into their USE in make.conf and
> > then complaining when the lack of SSP broke things ...
>
> But I'm not asking for USE="vanilla" to disable SSP completely, I'm only
> asking for USE="vanilla nossp" to disable it. "nossp" is already
> explicitly documented as "NOT FOR GENERAL USE", too.
>

No offence, but you are being very unreasonable in this thread.  The
fact that you can get what you are after, even though its not entirely
supported, should be enough for you, especially for the fact that you
are not clueless.

You should remember that somebody at the end of the day have to
sacrifice time and effort to fix bugs, and especially with something as
complex as gcc, the more variables, the more effort it is going to be.
And as Mike is relatively the only person currently who seems to
maintain gcc, it should be his prerogative to decided that he get too
much spam without the stubs.

And you should really know by now that being documented as "NOT FOR
GENERAL USE" will still not stop more than enough users to waste his
time in telling them not to disable SSP with vanilla if they don't know
what they are doing.


> Gentoo's gcc with the vanilla flag isn't the official GCC. Most patches
> don't get appplied, but some do. Plus, gcc[vanilla] isn't a supported
> compiler in Gentoo.

For the fact that we do not support vanilla gcc - I assume this is a gcc
built by yourself - this truly is really unfair of you to expect it.
The 'contract' we usually have with upstream, is that if we apply
patches to their software, we will be the first tier in the support
chain.  Now you want to run gcc which was not modified by us to fix the
known hangups in how we do things - or save us time for that matter, and
you still want us to support it - or at least make life easier for us by
not leaving gaping holes that cost us maintenance time?

Am I the only one feeling that this is really selfish/absurd thinking
since you have such an hackle in what we do, to not research, debug, and
file thus your own bugs with http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/ ?


The alternative to this that you seem to ignore, is that you can start
helping maintaining gcc (I am sure Mike will appreciate help with
Halcy0n gone as well, and me not having that much time currently).  And
of course promising so long as the stubs do not get applied with nossp,
that you will handle all breakage in that area.  Although I do not know
if its still really fair to expect Jakub et ell to sacrifice time to
process the bugs, and get them to you if its related to something
failing due to the missing stubs.



-- 
Martin Schlemmer