Re: (Fwd) Re: Absolute paths in BFD

[Ian Lance Taylor <ian at zembu dot com>]

   Date: Sat, 29 Apr 2000 18:06:38 -0400 (EDT)
   From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@delorie.com>

   >    If you want to reconsider that decision, I could rework the patches
   >    (although I don't understand why the GCC's way of parameterizing these
   >    macros is better than that of the other projects).
   > 
   > gcc's way is better because gcc and the binutils share the directories
   > include and libiberty.

   I didn't know that.

   Still, I'm not sure this is a reason good enough to borrow the macros
   from GCC, because GCC is quite a different beast.  For example, it is
   traditionally case-sensitive to file names, and treats, e.g., foo.C as
   a C++ source, even on DOS/Windows.  (The reason is compatibility to
   Unix Makefile's.)

That is not relevant to things like IS_DIR_SEPARATOR.  gcc can just
ignore issues of file name case, while still paying attention to
issues like directory and path separators.

   >    But please give me
   >    some hope that the new patches will be reviewed and committed to the
   >    Binutils CVS tree somewhat faster than the previous ones.  It can be
   >    quite frustrating to go through all the coding and testing once again,
   >    only to see the patches stuck in the queue for another 6 months ;-).
   > 
   > I wish I could give you that hope, but I can't.  If the patch is
   > simple, I can approve it quickly.  Otherwise, some other maintainer
   > has to do it.

   To me, these patches look as simple as they can get ;-).  With a
   couple of minor exceptions, they are actually the same change applied
   to several different places.

   But I will happily try to make them more simple, if you could tell how
   to do that.

Simple means not requiring any thought, not small.  It's easy to write
a small patch which requires a great deal of thought.  Your patches
required a number of thoughts; I tried to list them all in my earlier
message.

   > Yes, I think setmode could be a problem.  It might be best to test for
   > that separately.

   Testing (in the Autoconf sense) could be non-trivial.  Perhaps using
   setmode for DOS and Windows (conditioned on appropriate
   system-dependent macros, like __MSDOS__ and _WIN32) would be good
   enough?

Why is an autoconf test non-trivial?  Just see whether setmode exists.
I'm not concerned about a setmode function that does something else.

Ian