Compiling ports in a post-9.0-RELEASE world

[Konstantin Tokarev]

17.03.2011, 15:39, "Konstantin Tokarev" <annulen at yandex.ru>:
> 16.03.2011, 11:33, "Alberto Villa" <avilla at freebsd.org>;:
>
>>  On Wednesday 16 March 2011 09:15:07 Konstantin Tokarev wrote:
>>>   From http://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html
>>>
>>>   "In addition to the language extensions listed here, Clang aims to
>>  support
>>>   a broad range of GCC extensions."
>>>
>>>   So GCC extensions may also be considered as missing features.
>>  gcc-isms also means "bad code which is nonetheless supported by gcc"
>
> In this case don't hesitate to file a bug against gcc :)


Let me elaborate my idea a bit.

One may think that reporting bugs on GCC he supports development of
technology that FreeBSD does not endorse [1]. I don't think so.

1) Latest versions of GCC are more standard-compliant than earlier ones,
and bad written code tends to produce compilation errors with newer GCC.
For example, I've seen lots of legacy code written for GCC 3.x but failing
to compile with 4.x. 4.x branch is also being improved.

2) Active upstreams and Linux distributions try to make code compatible
with latest and greatest GCC. So if newer version is fixed not to compile
some kind of broken code, there will be big chances that upstreams will
fix it themselves.

3) Projects with dead upstreams should be excluded from ports collection
someday, unless maintainers are willing to do "upstream" job. Folks using
this software will be able to build it using "right" GCC version which is known
to compile this "crap" properly. 

And last but not least, GCC is still great compiler, despite of its drawbacks
and licensing issues.


[1] Bugs could be reported only for latest GCC version, i.e. 4.5.2, and
4.2.x will never get fixes. 


-- 
Regards,
Konstantin