[CCing to debian-alpha] As Chris (currently listed as package maintainer for gcc alpha) seems to be away, I'll ask on debian-alpha (Falk?), if this patch should be included. In that case the documentation should be changed to explicitely mention Debian instead of Linux.
Tyson Whitehead writes: > On Sunday 28 September 2003 14:54, you wrote: > > did you submit this patch upstream? If not, please can you do and > > attach the upstream PR? > > > > Thanks, Matthias > > Hi Matthias. I'm not quite sure by what you mean be upstream. Is it a > Debian > thing or a GNU thing. If it's the later, I posted a message on GNU GCC > mailing list about it a month or two ago. > > It didn't go anywhere. Richard Henderson (the Alpha fellow from Red Hat) > said > he wouldn't accept it into the general GCC unless all users of GCC (i.e. BSD, > etc) came forward and said they wanted it. > > He also gave three reasons why he personally didn't like it: > 1- The default under DEC C is to not IEEE compliance > 2- IEEE compliance leads to 'severe' performance penalties > 3- The vast majority of SIGFPEs are due to unitialized data reads > > While one and three might be true (timing tests show that two is just plain > wrong), they miss the point of the patch. > > The patch is intended to help achieve the goal of having as many packages as > possible run on the Debian Alpha distribution as possible (without needing to > specify Alpha specific flags). > > This means matching the GNU defaults on the other Debian architectures, and > that just happens to be IEEE compliant libraries and code. > > Thanks -T > > -- > Tyson Whitehead ([EMAIL PROTECTED] -- WSC-) > Computer Engineer Dept. of Applied Mathematics, > Graduate Student- Applied Mathematics University of Western Ontario, > GnuPG Key ID# 0x8A2AB5D8 London, Ontario, Canada