Build flag changes [ was Re: Large patch to merge in changes for gcc 4.3 ]

[John Dallaway <jld@ecoscentric.com>]

Jifl

[ moving to the ecos-maintainers list ]

Jonathan Larmour wrote:

> Therefore if we're going to be touching all HAL's CYGBLD_GLOBAL_CFLAGS,
> it's an opportunity to centralise these warning flags, which are entirely
> generic and are distributed identically across all HALs. I propose adding a
> CYGBLD_GLOBAL_WARNFLAGS CDL option in hal/common. And I will remove all the
> standard warning flags[1] from all HALs, and replace it with a reference to
> that option. More specifically I suggest that CYGBLD_GLOBAL_WARNFLAGS is an
> option which consists of a concatenation of CYGBLD_GLOBAL_WARNFLAGS_C,
> CYGBLD_GLOBAL_WARNFLAGS_CXX and CYGBLD_GLOBAL_WARNFLAGS_COMMON. Each of
> these takes their default_value from an identically named option with a
> _DEFAULT suffix. This allows package CDL to control the default, as well as
> letting users override it. It also starts to give us a route to avoid the
> horrible hackery in pkgconf/rules.mak to eliminate language-specific flags
> by replacing it with something properly controlled. If anyone has a better
> proposal, I'd like to hear it, although be warned that if it is more
> effort, then they can consider themselves automatically volunteered to do it!

I agree that the rules.mak hackery should be eliminated but your
proposal appears to involve a lot of CDL editing and suggests a need for
updated host tools to read and process the new CYGBLD_GLOBAL_WARN*
options. I'm concerned about the time overhead for debugging and testing
such changes at a late stage in the release cycle. Could your proposal
be split into phases to keep changes to a minimum for eCos 3.0 while
still avoiding multiple edits to the platform HAL CDL scripts?

John Dallaway