Hi, I just had an unpleasant experience with -ffast-math and GCC 4.1.1 (it borked my LDAP authentication on several systems which worked with the same CFLAGS as long as GCC 3.4.6 was used).
There is a lot of material out there about CFLAGS and Gentoo (google returns 387000 pages) but what's working for someone might not for another. There are flags that work for a GCC version and most ebuilds and don't work with another GCC version (my unfortunate experience) or some ebuilds. Flag combination/architecture/LDFLAGS might be an issue too. There are already good resources (http://gentoo-wiki.com/CFLAGS_matrix was mentioned to me by robbat2) but they may not be advertised enough. I'd like to propose a paragraph to the GWN editor which presents some gotchas and good references on the subject. Here's a draft for review. You're welcomed to expand on the subject. --- Draft BEGIN --- <section> <title>CFLAGS</title> <body> <p> Being able to tune the CFLAGS is part of one of the core principles of Gentoo: let the user be in control. Being in control brings both benefits and problems and CFLAGS tuning is not an exception. </p> <p> The recent upgrade to gcc-4.1.1 for x86 and amd64 users changed the landscape. Users that spent some time tuning their CFLAGS with gcc-3.4.6 might find out that an upgrade to gcc-4.1.1 leaves them with an unstable system. Example of this are : <ul> <li>nss_ldap stopped working with -ffast-math</li> <li>...</li> </ul> </p> <p> Users with unsupported CFLAGS (see the <uri link='http://gentoo-wiki.com/CFLAGS_matrix'>CFLAGS matrix</uri> for example) might want to return to safe CFLAGS (see <uri link='http://gentoo-wiki.com/Safe_Cflags'>Safe CFLAGS</uri>) if recent updates caused them stability problems. On the other hand, more adventurous users might want to experiment with CFLAGS that didn't work properly with gcc-3.4.6... As always, the user is in control. </p> </body> </section> --- Draft END --- If possible, I'd like to expand the list of 3.4.6 -> 4.1.1 upgrade problems which are linked to experimental CFLAGS. If you want to expand the subject to cover other tuning/stability gotchas that recent updates might have brought into the light, please feel free to do so. As English is not my native tongue, feel free to spell check too. Cheers, Lionel. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
