[Mingw-users] mingw+gsl: bug and workaround

[Guido De R. <gui...@gm...>]

Hi!

There's a long-standing problem when building Gnu Scientific Library
(gsl) with MinGW:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gsl/2006-09/msg00004.html

It might be a MinGW bug rather than a GSL one.

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-gsl/2006-09/msg00005.html

Recently I found a temporary  workaround:

I manually edited a Makefile and changed/expanded  the -O2 option of
gcc with the long list of equivalent options:

        -fdefer-pop \
        -fmerge-constants \
        -fthread-jumps \
        -floop-optimize \

etc. etc.

according to http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.5/gcc/Optimize-Options.html

Surprisingly, after this change (that is supposed to change nothing)
'make check'  finally passed successfully the whole test suite.

More details here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-gsl/2009-01/msg00053.html

It seems a very subtle bug, indeed it makes it difficult to get a
native Windows port of a popular library such as the gsl.

Hope these info give some clue toward a fix...

-- 
Guido