On Thu, 16 May 2019, Jacob Bachmeyer wrote: > > I suspect the origins may be different, however as valuable as your > > observation is functional problems have precedence over issues with code > > structuring, so we need to fix the problem at hand first. I'm sure > > DejaGNU maintainers will be happy to review your implementation of code > > restructuring afterwards. > > My concern is that your patch may only solve a small part of the problem > -- enough to make your specific case work, yes, but then someone else > will hit other parts of the problem later and we spiral towards "tissue > of hacks" unmaintainability.
I think however that fixing problems in small steps as they are discovered is also a reasonable approach and a way to move forward: perfect is the enemy of good. So I don't think the prospect of making a comprehensive solution should prevent a simple fix for the problem at hand that has been already developed from being applied. IOW I don't discourage you from developing a comprehensive solution, however applying my proposal right away will help at least some people and will not block you in any way. > The biggest hint to me that your patch is incomplete is that it only > adds -largs/-margs to wrap LDFLAGS. I suspect that there are other > -?args options that should be used also with other flag sets, but those > do not appear in this patch. Do we know what the GNU Ada frontend > actually expects? At first glance it looks to me we should be safe overall as compiler flags are supposed to be passed through by `gnatmake' (barring switch processing bugs, as observed with 1/3), and IIUC assembler flags are considered compiler flags for the purpose of this consideration as `gnatmake' does not make assembly a separate build stage. So while we could wrap compiler flags into `-cargs'/`-margs', it would only serve to avoid possible `gnatmake' switch processing bugs. There's also `-bargs' for binder switches, but I can't see any use for it here. Finally boards are offered the choice of `adaflags', `cflags', `cxxflags', etc. for the individual languages, where the correct syntax can be used if anything unusual is needed beyond what I have noted above. I'll defer any further consideration to the Ada maintainers cc-ed; I do hope I haven't missed anything here, but then Ada is far from being my primary area of experience. > > The ordering rules are system-specific I'm afraid and we have to be > > careful not to break working systems out there. People may be forced to a > > DejaGNU upgrate, due to a newer version of a program being tested having > > such a requirement, and can legitimately expect their system to continue > > working. > > We can start by simply preserving the existing ordering until we know > something should change, but the main goal of my previous message was to > collect the requirements for a specification for default_target_compile > so I can write regression tests (some of which will fail due to known > bugs like broken Ada support in our current implementation) before > embarking on extensive changes to that procedure. Improving > "target.test" was already on my local TODO list. You are welcome to go ahead with your effort as far as I am concerned. > Unfortunately, people with that particular attitude seem to have > acquired outsize influence over the last few years. I would suspect an > organized attack if I were more conspiracy-oriented, but Hanlon's razor > strongly suggests that this is simply a consequence of lowering barriers > to entry. Nod. Maciej
