[cfe-dev] Access to static protected member from friends of derived classes.

[Olivier Goffart]

Hi,

A few years ago, I was trying to fix the bug 6840 [1] that relates to access to 
static protected member from friends of derived classes.

I made a patch that fixes it at the time, but it was rejected because this was 
considered as a drafting error in the standard [2]. 

Recently, I attended a talk by a Debian dev who tried to compile all debian 
packages with clang. And that bug was one frequent cause of compilation error. 
[3]

I was wondering if it was not time to revisit the decision, and consider that 
this issue should be fixed after all.

The problem is the following:

class N { protected: static int m; };
class P : public N { friend class R; };
class R { 
  int foo() { 
     return N::m; // should work because the access is given via P.
    // but clang gives an error:
    // error: 'm' is a protected member of 'N'
  }
};

C++11 §11.4  explicitly states this is permitted, with an example. And gcc 
supports that fine.

Opinions?
-- 
Olivier

[1] http://llvm.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=6840
[2] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2010-June/009310.html
[3] http://sylvestre.ledru.info/blog/media/5/rebuild-debian-presentation-clang-July-10.pdf  (slide 35)