Compiler flags: upstream or Fedora ?

Ralf Corsepius rc040203 at freenet.de
Mon Feb 2 15:55:46 UTC 2009


Ulrich Drepper wrote:
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> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
>> Change your package to use Fedora's flags.
> 
> That's certainly not the best answer.
Right, I could have been more detailed.

> There are three types of compiler command line flags which come from the
> Fedora config:
> 
> - - general optimization
> 
> - - architecture selection
> 
> - - other code selection (like security options)
> 
> The latter two shouldn't be changed,  they should be used as provided by
> the build system.
Aurélien's package is likely subject to these 2 classes of problems.

c.f. for how ppc build-attempts are choking on i386/x86_64 arch-flags.

> But it is wrong to prevent a package from using different optimization
> options if it is obvious that the upstream optimization options have
> been carefully chosen. 
Theoretically not not much - In practice, quite a lot, because 
"carefully chosen" is hard to define and because "rarely used options" 
may have unwanted/undesired side effects (e.g. triggering bugs in GCC,
breaking debug infos, introducing arch-deps, etc.)

In this particular review, I think it's an "overzealous" upstream 
outsmarting themselves.

> The options from the build system are in this
> area only a good default.
Agreed, but diverging from them in most cases doesn't make much sense.

Ralf




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