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

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

> 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)



Alan.