RFC: architecture define probably masks variable names in header files

[Martin Buchholz]

Christian,

I care, and agree with you.

I recall many years ago, debugging a mysterious failure building Emacs.
Building on Solaris-Sparc defined the symbol "sparc",
and this caused the build to fail, only if a component of the
current working directory was "sparc".

Martin

Christian Thalinger wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 23:04 +0100, Christian Thalinger wrote:
>>Hi!
>>
>>Today I noticed that it's not a good idea to use an architecture define
>>as done in OpenJDK:
>>
>>CPPFLAGS_COMMON = -D$(ARCH) -DARCH='"$(ARCH)"' -DLINUX $(VERSION_DEFINES) \
>>		  -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE -D_GNU_SOURCE -D_REENTRANT
>>
>>The -D$(ARCH) e.g. on an Alpha system makes big problems because a lot
>>of variables are called "alpha" in GUI code.
>>
>>I tried to patch the OpenJDK code in IcedTea but then I reached a point
>>where it's not possible to fix the issue:
>>
>>/usr/include/png.h:
>>
>>typedef struct png_color_8_struct
>>{
>>   png_byte red;   /* for use in red green blue files */
>>   png_byte green;
>>   png_byte blue;
>>   png_byte gray;  /* for use in grayscale files */
>>   png_byte alpha; /* for alpha channel files */
>>} png_color_8;
>>
>>This won't work.
>>
>>Normally build systems use architecture defines as __ALPHA__ or
>>__alpha__ (these are also defined by the C compiler).
>>
>>Any chance to get this thing changed/fixed upstream in the OpenJDK code?
>>As I can't think of another solution of that problem...
>>
>>Probably someone decides to name a function argument "sparc"
>>someday... ;-)
> 
> So... noone cares?
> 
> - twisti