Mail Archives: djgpp/1996/03/04/16:11:00
On Mon, 4 Mar 1996, J.T. Conklin wrote:
> > Regarding a version modified by JT Conklin, all I know is that djgpp-msdos
> > has gone to something with fdlibm wrappers and some assembler code
> > bearing the name JT Conklin. There is a hue and cry from the news groupies
> > about mysterious failures and crashes. I have not investigated deeply
> > because it takes quite a long time to do a thorough job of testing.
>
> Oh, I did that a long time ago. At the time there didn't seem to be
> much interest in adopting it, so I stopped tracking it.
>
> There has been one bug found and fixed one of i386 assembly code
> routines since I made that first distribution. I wish I had been
> contacted when they decided to go with it.
>
> There is an unfortunate tendency within the free software community to
> integrate a piece of software without establishing correspondence with
> its maintainer(s). In my opinion, this fragmentation diminishes the
> leverage free software has over proprietary alternatives.
>
> I was very happy to see Roland contact me instead of just integrating
> the NetBSD libm into glibc. I hope that once it is integrated, the
> communication we've established will continue.
>
> --jtc
There is one bug in the djgpp distribution that I have definitiely
identified: the coprocessor is set to trap on divide by zero, instead
of quietly returning infinity. Discovering this made me feel very uneasy,
because the original fdlibm requires a strictly IEEE environment.
I hope you will be able to check out the code they are actually using
and help them ensure that it is working properly.
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