HEADS UP: Don't upgrade your Alphas!

[David O'Brien]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 09:23:36AM -0700, Fred Clift wrote:
> > David O'Brien writes:
> >  > On Mon, Mar 24, 2003 at 01:37:50PM -0500, Andrew Gallatin wrote:
> >  > > So, I think that making it the default is probably the best.  As long
> >  > > as somebody can turn it off with -mnoieee or something.
> >  >
> >  > Unfortnately, that is hard to do (turning it off). :-(
> >  > Do I commit my patches if it means one cannot turn it off?
> 
> 
> So how are you achieving this?  Are you changing makefiles in the
> buildsystem?

No, by hacking the compiler code.
 
> How about tweaking the compiler so that the default semantics are reversed
> and then change the flag -mieeee (or whatever it was -- can't remember) to
> just be -noieee as suggested?
>
> By just changing the compiler, we dont have to touch the rest of the
> system, and people can still get the desired behavior fairly easily...

Uh... show me your FSF GCC committable patches please.  You're boarder
line insulting me here, so do not offer anymore suggestions w/o some code
to back it up.
 
> I dont know what changes we make already but I understand that there is
> some customization to the compiler that is imported into the system.  So,
> what is one more change?

A PITA to maintain and something that might not at all port to some
future version of GCC like 3.3 or 3.4.