Re: Request easy bug fix

[David Malcolm <dmalcolm@redhat.com>]

On Tue, 2022-02-15 at 12:55 +0000, Jonathan Wakely via Gcc wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Feb 2022 at 12:34, Baruch Burstein via Gcc < 
> gcc@gcc.gnu.org>
> wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I hope it is not inappropriate to call attention to a specific bug.
> > https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla//show_bug.cgi?id=85487.
> > I tried to do it myself, but got lost on the part where I needed to
> > compile gcc 3 times and compare test results to some (un)known test
> > results.

Thanks for trying to fix the bug.

> 
> 
> You compare the test results of your patched gcc to the test results
> of an
> unpatched gcc.
> 
> How did you get lost? To "compile gcc 3 times" you just run "make",
> and it
> does that automatically (unless you configured with --disable-
> bootstrap, in
> which case it just compiles once).

Jonathan, if I may: you're extremely familiar with hacking on GCC, and
I think that familiarity is leading you to underestimate the learning
curve for someone new getting involved in GCC development.

As you say, --disable-bootstrap is the configure-time option to use
when working on a new patch, since it avoids the "compile 3 times"
cycle.  We could probably document that better.

> 
> 
> > It was too much time and setup for a fix that will probably
> > take 2 minutes to implement, so I am asking if someone that already
> > contributes to gcc can please look at this. I think it should only
> > take a couple of minutes to implement.

Baruch: here you are underestimating the time that adding a new feature
takes; yes, it perhaps could take about 2 minutes to get a minimal
proof-of-concept working, but once you start adding documentation,
test-cases, etc it becomes more than that.  Also, looking at the
discussion now happening in the bug report, it's not clear that the
absolute minimum implementation is the correct one

I'm guessing that you care because you're working in a mixed Visual
Studio/GCC environment, and have a codebase with these pragmas.
Does Visual Studio complain about mismatches, or incorrect nesting?
If so, can you give some more information about these interoperability
issues being discussed in the bug report?
(I used to work in such an environment, but that was over 20 years ago;
my knowledge of Visual Studio is *very* out of date, sorry)

> > 
> 
> No change ever takes two minutes, because you have to write tests at
> a
> minimum.


Hope this is constructive
Dave