Re: Require binutils 2.20 or later to build glibc

[Ryan Arnold <rsa at us dot ibm dot com>]

On Sun, 2012-02-26 at 22:16 +0000, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Feb 2012, Roland McGrath wrote:
> 
> > In its own right, I think 2.20 seems like a reasonable baseline.
> > But it seems suspect that we're requiring a binutils years newer
> > than the GCC we require.  Perhaps it would be OK to require 4.4.3
> > by now, which meshes better with 2.20.  But I'm not at all sure.
> 
> GCC release series are maintained for longer than binutils release series; 
> 4.3.6 was released on 27 June last year (and was the final release of 
> 4.3).
> 
> As noted in another discussion, there is at least one reason builds with 
> 4.3 fail right now (uchar.h, used in the build, doesn't work with 4.3).  I 
> don't know if there might turn out to be other causes of failure as well 
> if that (and the duplicate typedefs issue) were fixed.
> 
> Given that there were no objections and some support for the patch 
> requiring at least 4.3 I propose to commit in on Monday unless any late 
> issues come up.  We can still move to requiring 4.4 afterwards if we 
> decide we don't want to fix uchar.h to allow 4.3 builds and it seems 
> established that we aren't trying to support 3.4 through 4.2 any more.

Sorry, I was out on vacation for a few days.

I have a concern with making 4.3 the minimum compiler.  There are still
current and previous versions of GNU/Linux Distributions that have
earlier-than-4.3 compilers.

I maintain a toolchain that is built on n-1 distributions to work there
and at level n.  Making 4.3 the minimum compiler complicates the initial
bootstrap process (by introducing several extra stages).

> > I vaguely recall people posting before that requiring too new
> > a binutils was burdensome for some platform or other, but I don't
> > recall the details.  I think we should at least get each arch maintainer 
> > to weigh in explicitly before deciding.
> 
> We know it's required for x86_64, don't have a separate i386 maintainer, 
> and have SPARC maintainer support.
> 
> That makes it powerpc, s390 and sh we haven't heard from the maintainers 
> of.  I've CC:ed those maintainers; could you comment on whether requiring 
> binutils 2.20 or later is OK for your architecture?

I think have 2.20 as the minimum is fine.

Ryan