#1075 Requesting guidelines exception to drop -Wp,-D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS from mame package
Opened 2 years ago by belegdol. Modified 2 years ago

-Wp,-D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS has caused 3 assertion failures with mame so far [1,2,3]. As this flag is not supported and actually recommended against by upstream developers, this is beginning to cause friction. According to upstream, none of the three issues have been a real problem. Moreover, the assertion degrade the performance ever so slightly which is an issue with software like emulators which are performance-critical. Finally, mame is not secure software according to the upstream documentation [4].
The most recent issue contains some deeper explanation as to why this compiler flag is problematic. Thank you for your consideration.

[1] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/7760
[2] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/7967
[3] https://github.com/mamedev/mame/issues/8186
[4] https://docs.mamedev.org/initialsetup/compilingmame.html#gnu-c-library-fortify-source-feature


For reference, use of the standard compiler flags is a "must", so FPC has to approve exceptions.

Honestly, we should be somewhat horrified at the prospect of shipping something which is explicitly "not secure software", but if disabling this flag doesn't make this measurably worse in some way then I have no problems with it as long as it's very well documented. You do what you have to do.

This feels like someone from the GCC team needs to talk to the MAME developers, because there's a major disconnect here (as exemplified by gh#mamedev/mame#8186) in what these things are for and what they do. As @belegdol understandably doesn't really understand what's going on, perhaps @jakub or a member of his team could help here.

We have another issue brought forward by -Wp,-D_GLIBCXX_ASSERTIONS:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2035572
May I drop the flag from the package now?

The next FPC meeting isn't for a couple of weeks, but I'm fine with dropping it from MAME as long as it's documented with the appropriate references.

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