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Re: RFC: requiring GCC >= 4.7 to build glibc
- From: Joseph Myers <joseph at codesourcery dot com>
- To: <libc-alpha at sourceware dot org>
- Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2015 20:28:34 +0000
- Subject: Re: RFC: requiring GCC >= 4.7 to build glibc
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <alpine dot DEB dot 2 dot 10 dot 1508201344140 dot 30940 at digraph dot polyomino dot org dot uk>
Would anyone else like to comment on (a) the general principle of doing
time-based upgrades of the minimum GCC and binutils versions for building
glibc (so typically upgrade every other glibc release cycle, since GCC and
binutils have major releases about once a year) or (b) this particular
proposed increase?
For Linux kernel support I think the conclusion from the thread starting
at <https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2014-01/msg00511.html> was to
default to not supporting kernel versions not maintained upstream, unless
discussion indicates there are important distribution versions with older
kernels we wish to continue to support (when 2.6.32 ceases to be
supported, <https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html> says
"Mid-2015", I'll start the discussion of moving to 3.2 as minimum). The
discussion there noted cases where people control the userland but not the
kernel; that isn't an issue with GCC and binutils (people can always build
newer versions themselves if they wish to build new glibc on an old
distribution), so if anything I think we can be less conservative about
version requirements for GCC and binutils than for the Linux kernel.
For reference:
GCC 4.6 (current GCC requirement) was first released March 2011, last 4.6
branch release April 2013. Binutils 2.22 (current binutils requirement)
was released November 2011.
--
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com