Traditional cpp and assembler, revisited

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

Hi all,
last year we already had a discussion about -traditional-cpp in the
context of clang and the interaction with assembler. Since this is one
of the show-stoppers for building the system with clang, I would like to
revisit this and come to a decision. As discussed, there are esentially
three different options:

(1) Require gcc or pcc for building .S files. Introduce a new ASM_CC
variable for this purpose and use it for COMPILE.S and the MKDEP rules.

(2) Use the cpp from pcc and adjust the share/mk rules to allow .S -> .s
translations using it.

(3) Stop using the C preprocessor for assembler sources and switch to
some other preprocessor like m4. This is more involved since it requires
changing assembler code that uses e.g. machine/asm.h. It can also lead
to some duplication between m4 macro library and C headers. Positive
effect is that it would force us to visit all assembler files (at least
for the architectures clang/llvm support). Things like DWARF unwind
frames could be added to improve debugging support.

For legacy compatibility, (2) is the least amount of work and helps
other users of K&R-CPP like imake. (3) has its own merits. What is the
direction NetBSD wants to take?

Joerg