gcc-2.96 on RedHat Linux 7.3 does not support -Wno-strict-aliasing. The attached patches allow you to suppress the option by adding HAVE_NO_STRICT_ALIASING_WARNING= to the "make" command line.
Created attachment 5977 [details] pdlstrict.pat Patches to suppress -Wno-strict-aliasing by using HAVE_NO_STRICT_ALIASING_WARNING= on the make command line.
gcc 2.96 is really old and so is redhat 7.3 (about a decade?). gcc 3.x and 4.x both supports -Wno-strict-aliasing, I say, and it is a good thing for development and warn against writing bad code. If you really want to skip the option, you probably want to modify base/configure.ac to test for supported compiler flags or compiler version, around line 102: if test $ac_cv_prog_gcc = yes; then ...
oh sorry, the previous comment was for gs (there is no autoconf for ghostpdl) - but -Wno-strict-aliasing is a good switch to keep, against writing bad code.
I realize that -Wno-strict-aliasing is a good switch. My patches leave it enabled by default. The patches only provide a cleaner way to remove it when necessary. With the patches, you can remove it through the "make" command line. The unpatched version of ghostpdl requires you to remove it by editing main/pcl6_gcc.mak. For people who do builds on several systems from a shared NFS area, it is safer to control the options from a script (based on the version of gcc) than by removing them from the make file (which removes them permanently for all builds). I know that RH 7.3 is old, but we still have a number of RH 7.3 systems to support.
Looks good to me. Assigning to Ralph for review and commit.
Grabbing a Ralph's bugs.
Re-assigning bugs which still have work to do.
Thank you William, your patch is ghostpdl revision 11592.