[PPL-devel] PPL broken for Canadian-cross builds

[Roberto Bagnara]

Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Roberto Bagnara wrote:
>> Work has already started for producing an official PPL 0.11 release.
>> This will contain fixes for all the problems we discovered since the release
>> of PPL 0.10 (mainly portability ones), a new "formatted output" feature
>> that is needed in the MELT branch, plus other improvements, none of which
>> affecting the code generated by GCC.  I will write again when we can be
>> more precise about the release schedule.
> 
> I suggested a minimally fixed 0.10.1 to provide something maximally safe 
> to use with 4.4 (or 4.4.1, etc., depending on the timing) without needing 
> --disable-ppl-version-check; I'd be wary of explicitly approving multiple 
> versions for use with 4.4, or increasing the recommended version from 0.10 
> to 0.11, at this late stage.  For development for GCC 4.5, increasing the 
> recommended version to 0.11 would seem appropriate.

The point is that we had since long decided to make PPL 0.11, due to the
many little glitches people has reported and due to the fact that the
changes would not allow to preserve the ABI.  Backporting all the changes
to PPL 0.10 would be a lot of work and error-prone.  Given that the release
of GCC 4.4 is being delayed, what is the problem in having PPL 0.11 has a
prerequisite instead of PPL 0.10?  Notice that we can give a strong guarantee
that no change is going to affect the code generated by GCC.

> Unfortunately building with a cross-compiler is so much a normal way of 
> building GCC and the libraries it uses to me I didn't think PPL would need 
> specific testing with it or that the portability testing of PPL done when 
> support for using it was added to GCC would not have included it, so 
> didn't test it before now.

It is probably embarassing, but all this is completely new to us.
We announced the PPL 0.10 release candidate on October 27th, 2008
on gcc-patches at gcc.gnu.org and the PPL 0.10 release on gcc at gcc.gnu.org
on November 4th, 2008; no one raised this issue before.
Anyway we are working on this full time now.
All the best,

    Roberto

-- 
Prof. Roberto Bagnara
Computer Science Group
Department of Mathematics, University of Parma, Italy
http://www.cs.unipr.it/~bagnara/
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it