From: "Tim Van Holder" <tim DOT van DOT holder AT pandora DOT be>
To: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Cc: <djgpp-workers AT delorie DOT com>, <pavenis AT lanet DOT lv>
Subject: RE: About release of gcc-2.95.3 for DJGPP
Date: Wed, 21 Mar 2001 18:11:50 +0100
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> > But there we can be much more certain it's a file we can safely
> > overwrite.
>
> I don't see how: the fact that gcov usurped file names which end with
> `.gcov' doesn't mean no one else in the world uses that extension.
True, but since gcov appends ".gcov" to the source file name (as provided
by the .bb files, I expect), it will create foo.gcov.gcov in the case
someone should use foo.gcov as a source file name. This leaves only the
case where there is a non-gcov foo.c.gcov present. The chances of that
happening are a LOT smaller than hitting an existing file when trying to
work 'gco' into the extension in an 8+3 environment.

> I think it is quite deterministic.  In fact, I think it is easier to
> explain to the users what names they should expect than to write the
> code which implements that ;-)
Hehe - true, I suppose. But given that Joe Six-Pack seems to write
'gcc foo.o -o foo.c' often, it's safe to assume many more people will
accidentally kill files with gcov (then again, I don't know if many people
will actually use gcov).

> > If no other tools depend on the .gcov extension, I suppose it would be
> > cleaner for gcov to require a '-o output' on SFN DOS, leaving the choice
> > of an acceptable file name to the user.
>
> This might break automated scripts.
gcov is young enough to make this unlikely, though.
Then again, emacs' make-docfile requires a '-o' on DOS, and that breaks the
standard makefile too :-P (yeah, I know I'm supposed to use config.bat)

Look, anything is fine by me - I run in an LFN environment anyway; I was
just trying to point out some problems.