Re: [PATCH] xcoffread.c: remove include of partial-stab.h

[Elena Zannoni <ezannoni at cygnus dot com>]

Kevin Buettner writes:
 > On Sep 30,  5:08pm, Elena Zannoni wrote:
 > 
 > > Turns out that xcoffread.c used only 2 of the many cases handled by
 > > the switch in partial-stab.h. In order to reuse the whole file, a lot
 > > of macros had to be defined to do nothing.
 > > 
 > > I tested this patch on an aix4.3 system.
 > > 
 > > I know this file has no official maintainer, but I'll wait a few days
 > > to check it in anyway.
 > 
 > I've looked this patch over.  I've verified that only two cases of
 > partial-stab.h were needed by xcoffread.c.  Also, it appears to me
 > that you've correctly integrated the two necessary cases into
 > xcoffread.c.

Thanks for looking this over.

 > 
 > My only concern about this patch is with the duplication of the two
 > cases in xcoffread.c.  These hunks of code are of substantial size and
 > it occurs to me that correct maintenance of this code may require
 > keeping the various copies in sync.  I'm wondering if it'd be possible
 > to turn these hunks of code into functions.  That way we might be able
 > to avoid duplicating (some of) this code in three different places.
 > 

Yes, that was the way I started thinking about this code too. But I
realized that it is probably better to completely decouple these
cases, so that a change to accomodate format A doesn't affect format B
or C.  I think this common base was the reason for the 'fear' of
change in this code. By making these independent, it will become
easier to clean the code up w/o having to worry about other platforms,
that may be hard to test on (I had to dig around quite a bit to find
an AIX machine).  I think the code can be simplified more this way
too, for instance we can get rid of the macro DBXREAD_ONLY, and a few
others.

 > Kevin


Elena