Compiling ports in a post-9.0-RELEASE world

[Guido Falsi]

On Sat, Mar 12, 2011 at 02:00:33PM -0800, Doug Barton wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> As many of you are no doubt already aware, much work has been
> undertaken to make clang the default compiler for the src tree
> starting with 9.0-RELEASE. It is not 100% certain that this change
> will be made, but it's looking more likely every day.
> 
> This raises an interesting question for how to deal with compiling
> ports after 9.0 is released. So far there are 2 main ideas for how
> to deal with this:
> 
> 1. Fix all ports to compile with both gcc 4.2 (for RELENG_[78]) and clang.

This perhaps would be bst, but...(see below)

> 2. Adopt an official "ports compiler," which would likely be one of
> the gcc versions from the ports tree itself, and update all ports to
> work with it.

Since most of the software in the ports tree tends to be quite linux
or gcc centric I think 2 is the only viable option.

BTW I'd suggest a variation to 2. I think some option like "CLANG_SAFE"
or "USE_CLANG"(just saying, perhaps a better name can be found)
should be added to the infrastructure so, on 9.x and newer systems,
maintainer can sign that their port does build using the system
compiler. Obviously for ports having dependencies, especially
libraries, some extra testing should be performed to make sure
depending ports, which could use a different compiler, link correctly.

-- 
Guido Falsi <mad at madpilot.net>