219356 - Make configure bail on known-bad compiler options

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Firefox Build System :: General, defect)

Description

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

See bug 136999. Not knowing that I wasn't supposed to use -O2 on Windows, I used
it and it worked fine. On all my systems. Unfortunately, not on most other
systems, it just crashed, causing quite a lot of pain, because we discovered
that shortly before a release and I couldn't reproduce it. Didn't happen with
debug either, of course.

IMHO should configure detect compiler options which are known to produce bad
binaries, issue a warning (ideally with bug number), abort and allow to override
(in case I want to fix the bugs or re-test). This would save us (people
compiling Mozilla) to get burned by these bugs, if we are not aware of them.

Comment 1

[cls]

Having a list of known bad optimization flags implies that whatever's not on
that list is supported, which is not true.  The only known guaranteed to work
flags are the default ones.  Anything else and you're on your own.  FWIW, I use
-O2 for my win32 builds all the time without a problem but that's with gcc, not
MSVC.  

Comment 2

[Ben Bucksch (:BenB)]

I generally assume that all buidl flags work, not just the default ones. Nothing
in the build instructions says otherwise, IIRC.

Can't you at least warn about *known* bad compiler flags, so that people don't
get burned *unnecessarily*?

(FYI, I used MSVC++ 6)

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

MASS-CHANGE:
This bug report is registered in the SeaMonkey product, but has been without a comment since the inception of the SeaMonkey project. This means that it was logged against the old Mozilla suite and we cannot determine that it's still valid for the current SeaMonkey suite. Because of this, we are setting it to an UNCONFIRMED state.

If you can confirm that this report still applies to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it back to the NEW state along with a comment on how you reproduced it on what Build ID, or if it's an enhancement request, why it's still worth implementing and in what way.
If you can confirm that the report doesn't apply to current SeaMonkey 2.x nightly builds, please set it to the appropriate RESOLVED state (WORKSFORME, INVALID, WONTFIX, or similar).
If no action happens within the next few months, we move this bug report to an EXPIRED state.

Query tag for this change: mass-UNCONFIRM-20090614

Comment 4

[Chris Cooper [:coop] (he/him)]

Mass bug cleanup for Core:Build Config.

If you feel this bug has been closed in error, please re-open with new details.