On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 19:46 -0500, Patrick McCarty wrote:
> That's good news. Bison was the cause of some breakage on some

Not really. I read one mail of a reviewer - the only one I saw - of the
replacement code and judging from that it's probably much safer to just
revert that "patch".

> particular BSD builds. This should help make things more compatible.

That is also plain simply wrong - that breakage is not even a "bug" in
the widest sense as it may happen on handwritten code too. It's just
that newer gcc's tend to have better optimizers and checking so that
issues in "old code" are raised.

Can we please stop technically unfounded bison, flex and other code
generator tool bashing (for whatever reason) without any substantial
technical points.

For the protocol:
- the warnings there (and the perl/sed/... snippets to cure those) were
  introduced by me to get an idea if and how good the generated code is.
  Given the age of these tools (and their predecessors yacc and lex) and
  portability requirements for the generated code, it is far better (and
  more readable!) than lots of handwritten code I saw in my life.
- at that time, release didn't had an -Werror (and several warnings)
  activated because otherwise the handwritten code also had lots of
  warnings (more than the generated ones).
- -Werror was activated in the development to force people to think.
  But it was disabled for releases - just because it would break on some
  too old or too new gcc version somewhere.
- at some point in time all warnings != -Werror were activated because
  the code triggering the warnings were fixed.
- someone (I don't know who and/or when later on) activated -Werror also
  for releases.

So it's IMHO just a question of time that old release (with -Werror)
plain simply won't build on too new gcc's (and that may happen on
handwritten code too).

So please can I have any technical, valid and sane reason, which class
of problems is solved by replacing the use of old and proven code
generators with handwritten code?
I can't see or even think of any.

[ Fullquote deleted. Can we stop <pleonasm>unreadable full
quoting</pleonasm> too. Thank you.]

	Bernd, fed up with repeatedly technically unfounded bashing
-- 
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