On 29 May 2012 00:19, Jeremy Huntwork wrote: > Hello, > > I'm endeavoring to understand the history and purpose of the fixincludes > script. The README-fixinc states that the purpose is to fix > ANSI-incompatible headers which 'many vendors supply'. Is this really still > the case? Certainly by now this is very rare and corner cases should really > be fixed in the upstream packages...
The "upstream packages" might be a third-party OS vendor who supply their own compiler and have no interest in supporting GCC. Even if the OS system headers get changed, that doesn't help users who have the unchanged version (e.g. someone wanting to build GCC on SOlaris 9 isn't helped by a change in Solaris 11). New OS releases frequently include changes that need to be worked around (e.g. FreeBSD recently started using C++11 attributes in their system headers, which GCC doesn't support yet.) > Is there a reason to still run this script today when building gcc? Yes, definitely.
