Re: [RFC 2/2] Move gdb's xmalloc and friends to new file

[Alan Hayward <Alan dot Hayward at arm dot com>]

> On 18 Jun 2019, at 10:30, Alan Hayward <Alan.Hayward@arm.com> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On 17 Jun 2019, at 19:37, Pedro Alves <palves@redhat.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On 6/17/19 6:43 PM, Tom Tromey wrote:
>>>>>>>> "Alan" == Alan Hayward <Alan.Hayward@arm.com> writes:
>>> 
>>> Alan> Looks like this breaks the building of alloc-ipa.o when using Make 3.81
>>> Alan> I’ve tried this on a few different machines.
>>> 
>>> Thanks.
>>> 
>>> My first thought is that maybe we should simply declare 3.81
>>> unsupported.  It was apparently released in 2006:
>>> 
>>>   https://savannah.gnu.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=4380
>>> 
>>> ... so it is quite ancient.
>>> 
>>> Is there some compelling reason to keep supporting it?
>>> 
>> 
>> I think it depends more on what distributions ship than what
>> the release date was.  E.g., if you look around the last couple
>> stable releases of popular stable distros (e.g., ubuntu, debian, fedora),
>> which GNU Make version did they ship?  If the GNU Make version shipped
>> by default is not 4.x, is there an easy optional rpm/deb package
>> for GNU Make 4.x available?
>> 
>> This was the same kind of investigation that led to the GCC 4.8
>> minimum requirement.
>> 
>> Also, looking around the GCC compile farm machine (including the
>> /opt/ dirs) for what is available may be a good hint/proxy for
>> determining whether bumping the requirement could cause trouble
>> for people.
> 
> 
> Glibc requires 4.0:
> https://www.sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2018-08/msg00003.html
> 	Changes to build and runtime requirements:
>  	GNU make 4.0 or later is now required to build glibc.
> 
> 
> GCC still allows 3.8:
> https://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html
> 	GNU make version 3.80 (or later)
> 

I’ve done a little more digging into as many machines as I could find:

Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04 - make 4.1
Ubuntu 14.04 - make 4.0
Fedora 27 - make 4.2.1
Redhat 7.5, Centos 7.5, Centos 6 - make 3.82
Redhat 5.8, 6.9 - make 3.81
OpenSuse 42.2 - 4.2.1

Also: https://software.opensuse.org/package/make confirms a mix of 4.21 and
3.82 as the versions in various latest distros.

I’ve tried building using make 3.82, and it works for me.
Make 3.82 was released in 2010.

Any objection upping the minimum make version to 3.82 ?

If so I can raise a patch to add a statement to the NEWS file (similar to
the one that already exists).


Alan.