[vorbis] Compiler Cert Suggestions

[Monty]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 06:57:06PM -0700, Ryan Mack wrote:
> Somewhere on the download page you should make *very* clear that audio
> encoders in general are *very* compiler dependent. 

Not actually true.  The problem with egcs 2.91.66 was due to an
outright compilation bug.  Specifically, adding a float to an int and
comparing to an int caused it to use a broken insn that forgot to mask
off the appropriate FPU flag, resulting in that comparison always
being true, regardless of the values being compared.

That's not a compiler sensitivity.  It's an outright bug (and was
fixed, ironically, two weeks after RedHat shipped 2.91.66, which was
an unreleased version, and they continued shipping that bug for more
than a year).

> To that end, when you
> approach 1.0 release, you should enumerate known working and broken
> compilers (including which optimization flags are recommended for each).

If legit optimization breaks Ogg code, that's an Ogg bug, not a
compiler problem.

> I would also recommend you make an effort to supply for download binaries
> for more platforms such that only developers will need to ever build it
> from source.  The last thing a promising audio format needs is the
> Internet to be flooded with awful sounding encoded files because people
> didn't know their compiler was broken.

We'd do that anyway if we had the release engineering resources to do so.

Monty

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