On Wednesday 25 May 2011 15:18:57 Andrew Stubbs wrote:
> Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by
> incompetence! I forgot who said (something like) that, but it's
> certainly true in programming.

:) sure. Just checking what you meant by your previous statement.
 
> I know I've done things the lazy way, or misunderstood how to use things
> enough times myself, so I'm not going to trust others to be perfect.

Yeah, I agree with that. But with that argument you can basically shoot down 
any progress, because somebody might not be able to understand and apply it 
correctly. That's why I asked whether you can come up with an example of how 
the availability of a macro, which identifies the distribution, could lead to 
additional bugs. I just can't come up with anything.

> The code is frozen for anything but bug fixes, and even those have to be
> serious ones, I think. Adding a macro to a header is probably OK
> (Matthias?), but updating to 4.5.3 is out of the question.

Yeah, well. It's something I have never really understood about distributions. 
Upstream can be as throrough as they want in doing only bug-fixes in their 
patchlevel releases. Still there's this rule that the version number in 
released distributions may not change, even if it's all bug-fixes. So 
distribution users have to wait for the next distribution version for a fix 
(and new bugs: because often the minor or major version changed in the 
meantime) or use unsupported packages/compile from sources.
 
> I could add some sort of identifier to Linaro GCC, and Ubuntu GCC would
> pick that up.
> 
> But, so would half a dozen other distros (mostly embedded, I think).
> Each then add their own patches on top of that, potentially. These
> patches will fix bugs, add features, add bugs, and change random things
> to taste.
> 
> Does the Linaro identifier now mean anything? No, no more so than the
> GNU macros are working for you now.

Understood. But then I'd just call this badly implemented.

Every release (i.e. an update of a package is a new release; a different 
architecture OTOH is not a different release, because it's a well-defined 
difference) needs to be able to identify itself in some way.

Concrete ideas:
__GNUC_DISTRIBUTOR__: "Ubuntu"
__GNUC_DISTRIBUTOR_VERSION__: "1104"
__GNUC_DISTRIBUTOR_PATCHLEVEL__: "8"

Those macros ideally would become part of GCC proper and the values be 
settable via configure switches. I believe this scheme would solve all my 
problems and be understandable enough to both packagers and developers.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/780551

Title:
  incorrect interface in avxintrin.h

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