Re: sparse test failures on ppc32le (and other not so common archs)

[Josh Triplett <josh@joshtriplett.org>]

On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 08:47:55PM -0400, Christopher Li wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 4:55 PM, Uwe Kleine-König <uwe@kleine-> Yes
> that works. So to address the Debian bug I can do:
> >
> >  - move sparse to /usr/lib
> >  - teach cgcc about the move of sparse
> >  - make /usr/bin/sparse call cgcc -no-compile "$@"
> 
> I don't like that. It means the user can't invoke sparse directly.
> 
> >
> > or is it easier to teach sparse about the architecture stuff?
> 
> First of all. It is not very trivial to teach sparse about the architecture
> stuff. To my mind, we need to move all the cgcc logic into sparse.

Related to that: while it would mean we couldn't necessarily just rely
entirely on GCC's definitions for a target platform, I think in an ideal
world we could have a sparse binary that understood *all* target
platforms at once, such that you could ask Sparse on x86_64 to "compile"
as though targeting any arbitrary architecture. That would also have the
major advantage of making it easy to run the Sparse testsuite for
*every* target architecture without needing compilers for every such
architecture.