On 19/02/2021 12:18, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote: > On Fri, 19 Feb 2021 at 09:42, David Brown wrote: >> Just to be clear - I am not in any way suggesting that this situation is >> the fault of any gcc developers. If configure scripts are failing >> because they rely on poor C code or inappropriate use of gcc (code that >> requires a particular C standard should specify it - gcc has the "-std=" >> flags for that purpose), then the maintainers of those scripts should >> fix them. If Fedora won't build just because the C compiler insists C >> code is written in C, then the Fedora folk need to fix their build system. > > It's not Fedora's build system, it's the packages in Fedora's build > systems. Lots of them. And those same packages are in every other > Linux distro, so everybody needs to fix them. >
It seems to me that there are two very different uses of gcc going on here. (I'm just throwing up some ideas here - if people think they are daft, wrong or impractical, feel free to throw them out again! I am trying to think of ways to make it easier for people to see that there are problems with their C or C++ code, without requiring impractical changes on large numbers of configuration files and build setups.) gcc can be used as a development tool - it is an aid when writing code, and helps you write better code. Here warnings of all sorts are useful, as it is better to find potential or real problems as early as possible in the development process. Even warnings about style are important because they improve the long-term maintainability of the code. gcc can also be used to build existing code - for putting together distributions, installing on your own machine, etc. Here flags such as "-march=native" can be useful but non-critical warnings are not, because the person (or program) running the compiler is not a developer of the code. This use is as a "system C compiler". Is it possible to distinguish these uses, and then have different default flags? Perhaps something as simple as looking at the name used to call the compiler - "cc" or "gcc" ?
