[fpc-devel] About ppudump program

[Jonas Maebe]

On 23 Jun 2010, at 16:14, Doriano Blengino wrote:

> Jonas wrote:
>> First of all: please mention in the future that you are not  
>> subscribed (also in replies, because people may forget), so that  
>> people who reply know that they should CC you.
>>
> Sorry - I didn't notice (is it mentioned somewhere?).

I think it's normal to expect that people replying to a message on a  
mailing list may only reply to the mailing list if they don't know  
that you are not subscribed.

>> Well, as far as I know, ppu simply skips blocks that it does not  
>> know,
>> so I would think it is safe to use.

First of all, it is not safe. While ppudump indeed skips blocks that  
it doesn't know, the contents of the blocks can also change between  
different versions.

> I made some tries with two or three different releases, making  
> ppudump parse "its own" ppu files and ppu files from other releases.  
> At different extents, different problems arose. In one bad case,  
> ppudump (version about 2.2.0) crashed while parsing ppu files from  
> its own release, trying to allocate an enourmous block of memory. A  
> self compiled copy, took from 2.4.0 sources, did the same. Many  
> times it complained about "!! has more information" (who cares), "!!  
> refid out of range" or similar (critical).

ppudump is indeed often out of date because it's seldom used by  
compiler developers and not automatically tested.


Jonas