On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 11:10:32AM +0100, Roland Mainz wrote:

> Right... but the last code I saw was the libxrxnest.so Netscape plugin
> in the X11R6.8 sources and that code was untouched since more or less
> four years at that point.

There's more than that.  Check the gate for -_gcc=-fwritable-strings.
That's your sign that there's *known* code that was too time-consuming
or difficult to fix.

This reminds me that you could ask the gccfss guys what they did for
gcc4, which no longer offers this flag.

> It depends on how you define "sufficient way to test". I was often
> thinking about writing a OS/Net tree-wide patch for that... but I think
> this would be wasted work as long as we have to match the "requirement"
> that such a patch must be tested with all possible/imaginable codepaths
> (which is impossible for a single engineer (and even more difficult
> since I lack Sun's test suites) ... and I wish the barrier could be
> lowered to "... must result in a booting and running OS/Net which can be
> used for OS/Net development without problems... " - that would be a goal
> which we could archive quickly) ... ;-(

I'm pretty sure we've been down this road before.  That's not a high
enough standard.  A full PIT run is closer but I'd really prefer to
see an approach that looks for source or binaries with likely problems
and focuses testing on those.  We were finding writes into string
constants fairly late in the gcc effort and I have little confidence
that we really got them all.

> ... and as I said... the real problem is that Sun Workshop/Forte/Studio
> defaults to writeable string literals - this issue needs to be addressed
> ASAP...

If we had a time machine, that would obviously be the right thing to
do.  Sort of like the 256-fd limit.  But you're welcome to suggest it
to them; they make Major releases and often break stuff like this that
we then have to go work around.

-- 
Keith M Wesolowski              "Sir, we're surrounded!" 
FishWorks                       "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" 
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