Re: [RFC] Suggested ways to remove the need for xm-go32.h

[Michael Chastain <mec.gnu@mindspring.com>]

Christopher Faylor <me@cgf.cx> wrote:
> I guess the thing that sticks in my craw is the continual need to stand
> on our heads to accommodate that one theoretical system that just might
> not work as required.

Yes, that bugs me, too.  Especially because the "one theoretical system"
is usually some closed source system with a closed source C compiler for
building gcc.

> There is a list of targets which have maintainers, though.

That's true; I didn't consider the nature of the maintainers list.

> We're talking about making architectural changes which have a simple
> "will this work (yes/no)" criteria.  I, as a bad maintainer, would
> certainly respond to queries of that nature.

The problem is, for a lot of questions, it takes actual work to divine
the answer.  For this question it's possible to look in the man pages.
But other questions require people to actually build and run the
software.  Questions such as: "can we dump the special sourceware
version of expect and tell everyone to use the stock version",
or "do we need all this AIX-specific cruft in the test suite".

> I thought that fopen not working would be a pretty obvious problem with
> a pretty obvious fix.

Ah, I was a bit blind last night.

If gdb has a wrapper-less fopen:

  fp = fopen (filename, "rb");

Then the obvious workaround on host ancient-unknown-unix is
to keep it wrapper-less:

  fp = fopen (filename, "r");

I like wrappers better but it's not a big deal to me, wrapper-less
is fine with me.

Michael