Re: Build errors with GCC 14

[Jeffrey Kingston]

Dear Matej,

I'm afraid I know nothing about distros.  But last year I

upgraded my computer and I found that I had to do some

patching to get Lout to compile (I still use Lout every day).

I think gcc had taken to counting the number of characters

that sprintf writes into buffers, and complaining when it

couldn't be sure that the buffers were long enough to hold

them.  Anyway I conscientiously fixed all the errors and got

it down to a clean compile or something close.  I'm ashamed

to say that it did not even cross my mind that others might

need to do the same thing.

I'm not interested in doing any detailed work but I would be

happy to send you these files that I've got:

-rw-r--r--  1 jeff jeff 2172651 Jun 11  2023 lout-3.40.tar.gz

-rw-r--r--  1 jeff jeff  829862 Jun 11  2023 lout-3.40-user.ps.gz

-rw-rw-r--  1 jeff jeff 2176158 Jun 19  2023 lout-3.41.tar.gz

-rw-rw-r--  1 jeff jeff  829823 Jun 18  2023 lout-3.41-user.ps.gz

It looks as though I bought the new computer in June last year

and got around to getting Lout to work on it about a week later.

Jeff Kingston

ps I have done absolutely no tinkering with Lout's functionality.

---

From: lout-users-bounces+jeff=it.usyd.edu.au@nongnu.org on behalf of Greg A. Woods
Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2024 6:07 AM
To: Matěj Cepl
Cc: Lout Mailing List
Subject: Re: Build errors with GCC 14

At Sat, 18 May 2024 18:09:33 +0200, Matěj Cepl <mcepl@cepl.eu> wrote:
Subject: Build errors with GCC 14
>
> I am maintaining Lout for OpenSUSE distros, and we are currently
> in the process of preparation for the switch to GCC 14 [1], which
> has much more stringent checks on the code and many things were
> before just warnings are now build errors ([2] and [3]). When
> build in the experiemental project [4] it produces number of
> errors and the build fails [5]

I would strongly recommend using '--std=c99' (or as necessary
'--std=c89') to compile older code with a newer compiler such as GCC-14.

It also wouldn't be wrong to add '-fpermissive' as well.

The code was written to an older standard so don't try to foist new
language features on it without very careful consideration!

You really don't have to fix innocuous warnings just because the
compiler now defaults to a newer language standard that's not entirely
backwards compatible.

Of course real bugs should be fixed and reported.

Note too that Lout's makefile has long specified '-ansi', which is of
course equivalent to '--std=c89', along with '-pedantic'.

That said perhaps you haven't noticed the latest release from June of
last year that fixes all warnings (though I've found it needs to be
adjusted to use '--std=c99' instead of '-ansi'):

     http://jeffreykingston.id.au/lout/
     http://jeffreykingston.id.au/lout/lout-3.41.tar.gz

nThere's also William Bader's work to clean up warnings and make some
fixes:

              https://github.com/william8000/lout/

I would like to see him rebase any of his changes still "necessary" onto
Jeff's 3.41 though before recommending it wholeheartedly.

--
                                        Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>