-an and help page (Was: Re: [fpc-devel] Re: Episode 4. Addressing and it's limits Part Two)

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Tomas Hajny wrote:

> Yes, this is what I suggested to do above; for -an, not in general,
> because I don't know of such dependencies myself (I wasn't aware of it for
> -an either).
> 
> 
>> (b) having a line in the banner showing what non-default options were
>> used during build?
>>
>> Free Pascal Compiler version 2.7.1 [2012/02/06] for mipsel
>> Copyright (c) 1993-2011 by Florian Klaempfl and others
>> Built with EXTDEBUG, fvm32.
> 
> I'm afraid that this is "a bit" more difficult _if_ we want a general
> solution. Addressing individual options explicitly is possible (probably
> line by line rather than as a list though). Obviously, this wouldn't be a
> general solution. However, I'm not aware of any compiler macro allowing to
> list all conditional defines (that would be still the easier part, because
> these are obviously known within the compiler so adding a new macro should
> be possible, but it may be a long list), and even less a macro allowing to
> list just compiler defines added explicitly on the command line (rather
> than defined internally for a particular target, implied from some other
> command line options or defined within the respective source file)... I'd
> wait for opinion of other core team members whether we should add support
> for explicit "Built with EXTDEBUG" or do something else (but I'm certainly
> not the one who'd add a macro necessary for the general solution).

I suppose another possibility would be to have something in the makefile 
that captured the shell/environment variables, in the same way that the 
Lazarus build captures the revision number if available. But that's not 
in the same league as putting useful info in the banner.

I think a good starting point would be a line that showed any 
definitions that were known to have an effect on the interpretation of 
the options, e.g. EXTDEBUG and- in particular- the exact target CPU when 
this wasn't the default.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]