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[Patches] stdc-predefs.h breaks heinous preprocessor abuse
- To: patches@xxxxxxxxxx
- Subject: [Patches] stdc-predefs.h breaks heinous preprocessor abuse
- From: sacrificial-spam-address@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 10 Jun 2013 00:53:55 -0400
heinous, adj.: utterly reprehensible or evil; odious; abominable
Abuse of CPP has been a Unix tradition since before Imake, and the
stdc-predef.h mechanism, new to GCC 4.8, causes some new problems.
The linux bootloader lilo does some evil source code hackery to make
a common header file, which when fed through "gcc -E -C -traditional
-DLILO_ASM -o common.s common.h", produce a usable nasm assembler source
file. The preserved comments actually contain assembler source code
which should be ignored by the C compiler, and the opening delimiters,
which are not valid to nasm, are nullified with some trickery.
Anyway, the copyright notices in /usr/include/stdc-predef.h and
/usr/include/bits/predefs.h break this evil trickery, by including
multiline comments whose contents are not valid assembler.
Lilo (24.0) has already implemented a workaround, but it turns out that
there is also a quite painless fix to libc which avoids this problem,
and I'd like to suggest it in case there is some other dusty deck that
has similar problems.
Specifically, if the /* */ comments are preceded by #, then they
consistitute a null preprocessor directive and are stripped even when -C
is in effect. If a few # characters could be added to those two source
files, they would only produce blank and (if not suppressed with -P)
linemarker lines in the output, which later processing almost certainly
already knows how to deal with.
I realize this is an extreme corner case and the only known regression
is already fixed, but the libc fix is awfully simple. And cpp is still
retaining -traditional-cpp to cater to such abuses. I figured I'd at
least put it before you.
(Although a patch is trivial to generate and you're welcome to one, on
reflection I decoded not to include one to avoid the slightest copyright
legal issues. I *think* it's purely mechanical with zero creative or
artistic content and thus is not subject to to copyright, but letting
you write it seems even safer. sed -e "s+^/[*]+#&+")
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