Re: Thoughts about a floating point exception fix

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

> I've been thinking about issues with floating point exceptions on
> VAXen.  Currently it's difficult to compile packages such as python
> which have tons of floating point tests because so many of them fail
> because of infinities or NaNs.

Sounds to me like the packages' problem.  Do their authors simply not
care about portability to non-IEEE floating point?

> What if we made sure all the soft-float stuff is in libm and compiled
> certain tools such as awk and selected pkgsrc packages to use
> software floating point?

Do you mean software VAX FP or software IEEE FP?   The latter sounds
more consistent with the rest of your mail, but also sounds completely
perverse for port-vax, not to mention, as you say, causing no end of
trouble if less than the whole system is built that way.

> I think this would be a good way to fix some of these longstanding
> issues.

I disagree.  It wouldn't fix anything; it would merely paper over some
of the worst of the portability bugs in the software in question.

> Thoughts?

I think the software should be fixed.  If we (FWVO "we") don't have the
human cycles for that, I think the broken tests should be disabled when
building for VAX (or other non-IEEE FP) - or simply don't use the
(broken) software in question.

I do not delude myself that those opinons are widely shared.

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