Subject: bug#10519: guile and (mini-)gmp

From: [email-masked] (Niels Möller)
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2012 23:50:05 +0200

[email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> For me/us, the best workflow would be to have a Gnulib module.  That
> way, whenever GMP developers fix a bug in mini-gmp, we automatically get
> the fix when running “gnulib-tool --update”.

I guess you can do whatever you want in gnulib. But it should be made
very clear that the gmp repo is the "official" version. Some gmp
developers would be upset if a mini-gmp version in gnulib starts to
diverge.

> What about the maintenance overhead for GMP developers?  I mean, of
> those 5000 lines, most are copied from GMP, right?

Not really. Some of that code is of course copied from various other gmp
files, but a lot of it is written from scratch, giving priority to
simplicity over performance.

> So, bugs found in GMP may have to be fixed in mini-GMP too, for
> instance.

That's possible, but I don't think it's likely to be a big problem. I'd
expect the typical bug in mini-gmp to be in the code which is *not*
copied from other GMP files. And I'd expect the typical bug in gmp to be
in complex algorithms or assembly code, which doesn't have any
counterpart in mini-gmp.

mini-gmp does have a reasonable testsuite, even if it's not as thorough
as the main gmp testsuite. And mini-gmp is used in a normal gmp build
(via bootstrap.c), for computing various tables used by the main gmp
code. So the gmp project itself also depends on mini-gmp.

Reards,
/Niels

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