[asterisk-dev] backport RAII_VAR to 1.8?

[Russell Bryant]

On Fri, May 17, 2013 at 1:35 PM, Paul Belanger <paul.belanger at polybeacon.com
> wrote:

> On 13-05-17 01:22 PM, Matthew Jordan wrote:
>
>> On 05/17/2013 10:46 AM, Richard Mudgett wrote:
>>
>>> I'm working on a fairly invasive set of fixes that apply to 1.8. It
>>>> would be really handy to be able to use RAII_VAR there since I
>>>> intend to submit the same fix for 11 and trunk, as well.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Is there any reason we can't include RAII_VAR in 1.8?
>>>>
>>>
>>> The only reason I can think of is some OS versions have old compilers
>>> that do not support the gcc feature used for RAII_VAR.
>>> CentOS comes to mind.
>>>
>>>
>> It is the greatest thing since sliced bread...
>>
>> I do know that when we added it, we had at least one bug report from
>> someone who was using clang to compile Asterisk. We opted not to remove
>> RAII_VAR, but at least at the time 11 was new, and they still had 1.8 to
>> use.
>>
>> Backporting it to 1.8 midstream would be a hard stop to anyone
>> attempting to compile Asterisk with anything other than gcc - which is,
>> admittedly, unsupported.
>>
>> I don't think that's a show-stopper, but it is probably the largest risk
>> that I can think of. I'm personally fine with it, but at least wanted to
>> note that before you went ahead and did it.
>>
>>  A better question would be, would you backport it into certified
> asterisk too?
>
> I'm always against backporting to a release branch, simply because we
> never can fully predict the results. That said, I'm still at 1.8.7.1, so as
> long as we expect bug reports to happen and we address any regressions with
> higher priority, but that is just my opinion.


The size of this backport is tiny.  It's a small macro.  It's just
incredibly useful and actually helps write code less likely to contain
errors.

If it's a problem, it shouldn't be *too* hard to pull it back out.  The
difficultly comes with however many places you have started using it.  In
my case, it's in the SLA code, so it's a pretty small fraction of the code
base.  If it gets backported, explodes through the 1.8 code, and then a
problem is found 6 months later, that would be much more painful.  I
wouldn't expect it to spread too fast in 1.8, since the changes are
intentionally minimal.  It just might make fixing some bugs easier.

Compiler version impact is worth considering.  I don't know what the
specific impact is in terms of distro support, though.  How about we assume
it's ok, and if there's an uproar, I agree to do the work to revert the
usage I added.

-- 
Russell Bryant
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