Re: netbsd build update

[John Darrington]

On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 08:08:42PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:
     
     I do think that -mieee is a good idea, but I think we should look
     for a secondary problem too.  Here is one idea: PSPP tries to
     turn off FPEs entirely, in fpu_init() in main.c:
     
         static void
         fpu_init (void) 
         {
         #if HAVE_FEHOLDEXCEPT
           fenv_t foo;
           feholdexcept (&foo);
         #elif HAVE___SETFPUCW && defined(_FPU_IEEE)
           __setfpucw (_FPU_IEEE);
         #endif
         }
     
     Does NetBSD support either of the approaches we try there?  That
     is, is HAVE_FEHOLDEXCEPT or both HAVE___SETFPUCW and _FPU_IEEE
     defined when that function is compiled?  If not, then we should
     find out how we turn off FPEs on NetBSD and add that to the
     possibilities.  (We should possibly warn about this at configure


I'm not sure exactly what these functions do, but are you advocating
we should ignore floating point errors?   It's ok to turn off FPE's if
we can ensure that the result of a floating point error will be NaN,
but if not, then I would rather have PSPP crash, than to carry on and
give erroneous output.

J'
     

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