Bug#687169: libgmp-dev: remove the __GMP_CC and __GMP_CFLAGS lines from gmp-*.h files (or explain why they should be kept)

[Steve M. Robbins]

Hello Vincent,

I've read your email a few times and I'm having a hard time understanding why 
you believe a bug exists.

The preprocessor symbols at issue are preceeded by the following comment:

/* Define CC and CFLAGS which were used to build this version of GMP */

... and they do exactly that.  If you have no need for this information, I 
would suggest you are free to ignore it.  If you feel it is harmful, you can 
always advocate for upstream to remove them.


On September 10, 2012 09:12:24 AM Vincent Lefevre wrote:

> The reason for asking the removal of such lines is that more than
> being useless, these lines may contain incorrect information when
> GMP has been built on some machine and gmp.h is distributed on
> other machines, which have a different environment.

I don't follow.  The symbols are defined at the time of build and are exactly 
the flags used to build the version of GMP distributed.  Short of a bug in the 
build script, they cannot be incorrect.  


> If you think that keeping these lines is better under the Debian
> context, then it would be a good idea to add a
> 
>   /usr/share/doc/libgmp-dev/README.Debian
> 
> file explaining why (so that the user doesn't think that something
> may be wrong in the Debian package).

I think it is unlikely that anyone will be confused by this.  This is the first 
complaint I've heard in my 9 1/2 years of maintaining gmp.


Regards,
-Steve