RE: [MiNT] MiNT and PureC

["Julian Reschke" <reschke@muenster.de>]

> From: owner-mint@fishpool.com [mailto:owner-mint@fishpool.com]On Behalf
> Of Guido Flohr
> Sent: Tuesday, June 01, 1999 6:30 PM
> To: MiNT mailing list
> Subject: [MiNT] MiNT and PureC
>
>
> Hi!
>
> ...
>
> PureC is somewhat different but also problematic.  Christian Felsch does
> his best to keep the PureC support up-to-date but in fact the patches he
> can send always apply to the last version of the MiNTLib.  Why not save
> space and net bandwidth and distribute the necessary patches for PureC in
> a separate distribution.  Most users will not miss anything and those that

Because that would make the synchronisation of both versions even more
complicated.

> want to use Pure are then always a little behind but I think that's more
> acceptable than the current situation.  Currently you download the MiNTLib
> sources and when compiling for Pure you will have to read ChangeLog very
> carefully to find out what there is possibly left to do.  It's also
> dangerous because if for example you forget to add a new source file to
> the project file resp. Makefile for Pure you will end up with a crippled
> library.

Actually this means to me that it should be the goal to release libraries
which work PureC without habing to apply changes at all :-)

BTW: it should be possible to maintain a unique makefile for both compilers,
right?

> Anyway, I'm not very happy with distributing source files that I cannot
> test.  I'd rather exclude them.
>
> Any comments?

I'd like to discuss what these differences actually are. If it's just a
matter of adding proper function prototypes (which PureC requires), I would
argue that it should be tried to release libraries which actually compile
with GCC in pedantic mode. Except for the cases where assembly code is
needed, this should take care of almost all problems.