Clang as default compiler November 4th

[Chris Rees]

On 11 Sep 2012 13:22, "Konstantin Belousov" <kostikbel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Sep 11, 2012 at 02:06:49PM +0200, Roman Divacky wrote:
> > > > tl;dr: Clang will become the default compiler for x86 architectures
on 2012-11-04
> > >
> > > There was a chorus of voices talking about ports already. My POV
> > > is that suggesting to 'fix remaining ports to work with clang' is
> > > just a nonsense. You are proposing to fork the development of all the
> > > programs which do not compile with clang. Often, upstream developers
> > > do not care about clang at all since it not being default compiler in
> > > Debian/Fedora/Whatever Linux. The project simply do not have resources
> > > to maintain the fork of 20K programs.
> >
> > We currently dont compile 4680 ports (out of 23857). Top 10 ports that
prevent
> > the most other ports from compiling together prevent 2222 ports from
> > compilation. So if we fixed those 10 ports we could be at around 2500
ports
> > not compiling. Thats quite far from your claim of forking 20k programs.
> Sorry, I cannot buy the argument. How many patches there are already
> in the ports tree to cope with clang incompatibility with gcc ? You may
> declare that all of them are application bugs, but it completely misses
> the point.
>
> >
> > > Looking from less amiable angle, you propose to knowingly break
significant
> > > and important piece of the project work. My belief is that switch
cannot
> > > be done before ports switch to the port-provided compiler.
> >
> > I believe majority of the broken ports is broken because their
maintainer
> > never saw them being broken with clang just because it's not the default
> > compiler. Thus by making it the default majority of the problems would
just
> > go away.
> Can you, please, read what I wrote ? Fixing _ports_ to compile with
> clang is plain wrong. Upstream developers use gcc almost always for
> development and testing. Establishing another constant cost on the
> porting work puts burden on the ports submitters, maintainers and even
> ports users.
>
> I do strongly oppose the attempt to drain the freebsd resources by
> forcing porters to port third-party code to other compiler.

I definitely see your point, but upstream should also be writing
correct/portable code.  Whenever a patch to fix a port is made, it is
actually mandatory to report it to upstream, and nag them to hell until
it's committed!  Most are very happy for this to happen; we've been
removing GNUisms from build scripts etc for years now (and I could link to
a "Thank you" email for all the build fixes I've sent upstream).

Sometimes, like the common bashism if [ a == b ] we bite the bullet and add
the extensions ourselves; sometimes upstream has an education on writing
portable code!

If we were all the same, would there be much point in being different?

Chris