Re: "make distcheck" fails

[Paul Eggert]

On 7/11/20 4:15 AM, Bruno Haible wrote:

> I can reproduce it on an Ubuntu 16.04.x machine:

> m4.c:166:1: error: function might be candidate for attribute 'pure' if it is 
> known to return normally [-Werror=suggest-attribute=pure]
>   fault_handler (int signo)
>   ^

...

> It is not clear to me whether the function 'fault_handler' should be
> marked with attribute 'pure' or not.

'pure' does sound dicey, as the intent is for 'pure' to be useful to a compiler 
when doing optimization and it's satisfying that intent, but on the other hand 
the function does have side effects visible to the caller.

Anyway, GCC 10.1 doesn't issue the diagnostic for me, I hope because GCC has 
been improved since the GCC 5 that comes with Ubuntu 16.04. So I hope we can 
leave this alone, as we can assume that whoever prepares m4 distributions has a 
more-modern GCC.