Bugzilla – Bug 103976
Gforth as bad as always
Last modified: 2010-08-06 15:34:05 UTC
Gforth is compiled without libffi, rendering the foreign function call interface useless. libffi has been part of GCC since 3.4.0, and clearly part of 4.0.0, so what's up?
Stupid.
May sound stupid, but as the project leader of Gforth, I'm annoyed with the quality of SuSE's Gforth build. Gforth relies on libffi to call C libraries, without this feature, it's just a toy, not integrating well into Linux. Therefore, please be kind to either fix the problem, or remove this crap complilation of Gforth from SuSE Linux - our users have to reinstall Gforth from sources, anyway. Well, for SuSE 10.1, I can fix it myself, but as long as you call a bug report from the originator of the software "stupid", what should I care about the quality of your product?
You'll get a better chance of getting it fixed if you don't write crappy bug reports.
Ok, here's a less crappy bug report: The INSTALL file of Gforth 0.6.2 (out for more than two years) tells you: ---------- Prerequisites You need gcc version 2.0 or later to compile gforth. Recommended: gcc-2.95.* (other versions produce slower code). To use the new C interface, you need to install the ffcall libraries before configuring Gforth. You can find them on ftp://ftp.santafe.edu/pub/gnu/ffcall-1.8.tar.gz (USA) ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/gnu/ffcall-1.8.tar.gz (Europe) ---------- SuSE never came with ffcall-1.8, so Gforth didn't link to it. Neither had SuSE the GCC-3.4.x/4.x libffi, the successor of the ffcall libffi. Unfortunately, the libffi 2.0 that ships with GCC 4.0.2 is not 100% compatible with the old one (that's why the configure process doesn't work out to use it).
How about you fix the configure process to work correctly with gcc's version? Then next time gforth is updated it will do the right thing.
Long dead.