[Buildroot] Patchwork cleanup week #24

[Arnout Vandecappelle <arnout@mind.be>]

On 15-06-16 22:06, Thomas Petazzoni wrote:
>  3. toolchain-wrapper: prevent use of unsupported -fstack-protector*
>     http://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/545315/
> 
>     This patch proposes to make the toolchain wrapper fail immediately
>     when -fstack-protector is passed to gcc, but SSP support is not
>     available. This helps with some packages that assume that compiling
>     with -fstack-protector is enough to determine if SSP support is
>     available, while in several cases, doing a link test is necessary.
> 
>     I personally don't really like this change, as I believe it's
>     adding even more sorcery to our toolchain wrapper. Instead, the
>     problematic upstream packages should be fixed. Plus, at the time,
>     we had a few packages in this situation, but nowadays, I don't
>     think we have build failures due to this.
> 
>     So, my proposal would be to reject this patch.

 I originally advocated for this patch (see
https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/patch/543115/ ). My reasoning was that it's very
hard to write a reliable test for stackprotector, because optimisations can
easily elide so much from the test that the stackprotector disappears.
Therefore, a test that works fine for the current compiler may break down with
future gcc releases.

 Also, I prefer to be able to resolve entire classes of build problems rather
than patching individual packages. The toolchain wrapper is a clear example of
this: it only exists because packages don't reliable handle CFLAGS, otherwise we
could just pass --sysroot etc. in CFLAGS.

 On the other hand, for this particular case, autobuilder errors will appear for
failing packages, so at least it's not a hidden issue.

 Regards,
 Arnout

-- 
Arnout Vandecappelle                          arnout at mind be
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