[PATCH v1 00/35] Require GNU C --at least GCC 5 or Clang 4-- in headers

[Collin Funk]

Alejandro Colomar <alx@kernel.org> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Probably, not many people (if any) test all those old configurations.
> That code is likely to have bugs.  Let's remove it, which simplifies
> a lot of code, and allows us to write better new code.
>
> For now, I've raised the minimums to GCC 5 or Clang 4, but we can
> probably raise it further later.
>
> I've successfully tested for regressions on
>
> 	$ uname -a
> 	Linux devuan 6.16.12+deb14+1-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.16.12-2 (2025-10-16) x86_64 GNU/Linux

Adding Bruno Haible to CC.

Some of these changes are in files shared with Gnulib, which works
perfectly fine with GCC 4. We had someone building with GCC 4.1
recently, so it is still tested [1].

I would like to avoid dropping old compiler support if possible. Guix
uses GCC 4 for bootstrapping [2]. If Gnulib drops support for it, I
assume it will make their lives harder.

Collin

[1] https://lists.gnu.org/r/bug-gnulib/2025-09/msg00128.html
[2] https://codeberg.org/guix/guix/src/commit/c4fdfa3174d374199c04420fb636a573a02d7834/gnu/packages/bootstrap.scm#L921