RE: GDB -Wmissing-prototypes and flex troubles

Pierre Muller
2012-06-13T07:43:24Z

> Objet : Re: GDB -Wmissing-prototypes and flex troubles
>
> > Should we:
> > 1) Specify a minimal version for flex?
> > 2) disable missing-prototypes option
> > for ada-exp.c compilation?
> > 3) Do 2) if version if below
> > minimum version adding those prototypes?
>
> The lazy way would be to require a minimal version for flex.
> I would be OK with that, although it is true that it is a bit of
> a shame that the user does not get an error at configure time.
> It should be relatively easy to do, except that this would force
> me to upgrade many installs of flex on some of AdaCore's machines.
> I don't mind doing the update too much, and I should, except
> I usually find out at the wrong moment, and I then just get past
> the error by copy/pasting the compile command, removing the -Werror
> flag, and then resume the build. And also, an error would be
> preventing people from building a release with an older version
> of flex, even though the warnings would be harmless and non-fatal.

My problem is that I don't know how to be able
to use the automatic tester on a machine that I don't own,
meaning that I can't upgrade flex easily...

> I don't think we want to unilaterally disable -Werror for ada-lex.c.
> We'd open the door to allowing warnings back in again, when we did
> all the work to clean them up.

Please remember that ada-lex.c isn't compiled directly,
it is included inside ada-exp.c source.

> A variation of 3. Something like the following close to the start
> of ada-lex.l:
>
> #if <FLEX_VERSION> < <2.5.35>
> /* Older versions of flex do not provide prototypes for these
functions.
> Provide them ourselves, to avoid -Wmissing-prototypes warnings. */
> int yylex_destroy (void );
> int yyget_debug (void );
> void yyset_debug (int debug_flag );
> YY_EXTRA_TYPE yyget_extra (void );
> [...]
> #endif
>
> I am not completly sure that this is going to work, maybe if some
> types are missing, for instance. Or maybe the prototypes depend on
> the version of flex.

It will be even more tricky as Mark mentioned that version 2.5.4
does not seem to suffer from this problem...

> With all this being said, your option (3) is attractive. Except
> that in terms of implementation, it forces us to have a special
> rules for ada-lex.o.
The ruel should be for ada-exp.o

> All in all, I tend to vote for the status quo...

The automated script checks out a clean git HEAD,
which means that the only way for me would be to added
a global GDB_ERROR_CFLAGS=""
which seems really a bad thing to do when you want to test
that your patch is not going to hurt or give new warnings :(

I solved it locally by downloading 2.5.35 sources,
configuring, compiling and installing in my home directory...
But this is not really a nice solution either.

Pierre Muller