Re: TODO additions

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>       /* GNU libc requires ORDINARY_LINK so that its own crt0 is used.
> 	 Linux is an exception because it uses a funny variant of GNU libc.  */
> 
>     I don't know about the first sentence, but I think the second isn't
>     true on modern systems,
> 
> Could you explain at greater length how it is not true?

Well, it's not true unless, for instance, you consider the diffs in
the current Debian source package to constitute a `funny version'.
They are relatively small changes which I think mainly are mainly
picked from glibc development anyhow.  (In a recent discussion I saw
about the next upload for Debian libc6, the advice was actually to
package source directly from glibc's CVS.)  The old `libc5' was a
different kettle of fish.

> 			    and it's not clear whether it would be an
>     advantage if the gnu-linux configuration was be changed for
>     configurations using libc6.
> 
> I don't understand--what change are you contemplating?

I'm not particularly, but you said it might be good to eliminate
ORDINARY_LINK.  The libc situation seems to have changed for modern
systems from the old libc5, so perhaps there's some advantage to
updating the configuration file.  I don't know, but I think the
comment above is incorrect anyhow.

The message is that a lot of the stuff in the m&s files is obscure and
under-documented and tends to cause trouble when included by another
configuration.  (I think you have to have worked on several random
configurations recently to get a feel for this.)  It would help if all
the macros which have an effect in the source were documented
AC_DEFINE or AH_TEMPLATE doc strings in configure.in.

It would also be worth discarding configurations for systems that
you're confident aren't running now.  Going through them all makes
life harder when doing general cleanups, such as for alloca to make
sure it's always properly declared.  I recently deleted GEC 63 since I
worked on the last of those, and I'm sure there are other candidates.