Any objections to swapping base compilers to make gcc4.7 the default?

John Marino dragonflybsd at marino.st
Fri Feb 1 01:03:08 PST 2013


The gcc-4.4 compiler is still the default compiler on DragonFly-3.3. 
There seems to be general consensus on IRC that it's time to promote 
gcc-4.7 to that role and have gcc-4.4 serve as the backup.

Is there any major objection to doing this?

 From a pkgsrc point of view, over 11,150 packages build with gcc-4.7. 
There are some older packages that fail the stricter gcc-4.7 checks that 
are easily patched, but they take time to add.  However, one could take 
a page from dports where gcc-4.4 is the primary compiler for pkgsrc 
regardless of which the system uses.  So to summarize: gcc-4.7 can 
already build most of what gcc-4.4 can in pkgsrc (plus some that it 
can't), and users could put "DRAGONFLY_CCVER?=gcc44" in the 
/usr/pkg/etc/mk.conf file if they want to keep using gcc-4.4 for packages.

There's only one known problem with gcc-4.7 right now: The plugin 
mechanism introduced around gcc-4.6 doesn't work right.  The 
world/kernel doesn't use this mechanism and only 1-2 packages are 
failing because of it.  Nevertheless I'd like to fix it, so I'll attempt 
to do before before a compiler switch.  However, failing to do so 
shouldn't block the switch.

So as the title says, is there a good reason to hold off on making 
gcc-4.7 the primary compiler?

John



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