On 11/19/2015 5:53 PM, Sandra Loosemore wrote:
On 11/19/2015 06:23 PM, David Wohlferd wrote:
About the only immediate task would be to ensure that the
documentation for traditional asms clearly documents the desired
semantics and somehow note that there are known bugs in the
implementation (ie 24414, handling of flags registers, and probably
other oddities)
Given that gcc is at phase 3, I'm guessing this work won't be in v6? Or
would this be considered "general bugfixing?"
The reason I ask is I want to clearly document what the current behavior
is as well as informing them about what's coming. If this isn't
changing until v7, the text can be updated then to reflect the new
behavior.
Documentation fixes are accepted all the way through Stage 4, since
there's less risk of introducing regressions in user programs from
accidental documentation mistakes than code errors.
The code change isn't yet finalized. I'm hoping to doc something
vaguely like:
"basic asm (other than at top level) is being deprecated because <blah
blah> potentially unsafe due to optimizations <blah blah blah>. You can
locate the statements that will no longer be supported using
-Wonly-top-basic-asm. Change them to use extended asm instead."
What's your take on having the user guide link to the gcc wiki? If we
do make this change, I'd kinda like to create a "how to convert basic
asm to extended." But it doesn't seem like a good fit for the user
docs. But if the user docs don't reference the wiki, I doubt anyone
would ever find it.
OTOH, I'd discourage adding anything to the docs about anticipated
changes in future releases, except possibly to note that certain
features or behavior are deprecated and may be removed in future
releases (with a suggestion about what you should do instead).
I'd love to see the doc folks make a pass and remove every "some day
this won't work" text that doesn't include this. If there is no way for
users to prepare, you aren't helping.
And remove all the "some day there might be a new feature" stuff too.
It just wastes users' time trying to figure out if "some day" has
arrived yet. And it makes them cry when the new feature, which is
exactly what they need, isn't there yet.
We've already got too many "maybe someday this will be fixed" notes in
the manual that are not terribly useful to users.
You'd get my vote to remove them all. If I got a vote.
dw
