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Re: Require GCC 4.3 or later to build glibc
On Thu, 23 Feb 2012, David Miller wrote:
> From: "Joseph S. Myers" <joseph@codesourcery.com>
> Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 21:00:25 +0000 (UTC)
>
> > Comments?
>
> No objections, there's probably some other feature tests that become
> unnecessary as a result of this change and can thus be removed.
If a feature test gives an error when a feature is missing, it's pretty
harmless if all supported compilers support that feature - though the test
is also pretty useless (it might sometimes detect breakage in the
compiler, but there's no particular reason to suppose that breakage is
more likely than any other way a compiler could happen to be broken).
If a feature test conditions how the library is compiled or what features
are supported, then certainly it cleans things up to remove those
conditionals - either converting the feature test to give an error if the
feature is missing, or removing it altogether. Quite a lot have been
converted to give errors lately.
There are a few tests that need to be overridden when bootstrapping cross
tools because they try to link with standard libraries or otherwise do
things that don't work before you already have libc for the target.
Those I do intend in due course to remove or weaken (given that all
supported compilers and binutils should pass the tests) to make such
bootstraps easier. But first I want to do some experiments to see what
binutils versions actually work, and update that configure test /
documentation accordingly. (The configure test is for 2.13 or later, the
documentation says 2.15 or later, but I doubt anything as old as 2.15
actually works - my guess is that something more like 2.17 to 2.20 is the
minimum version that is actually usable now.)
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com