Updating system GCC

[John Nielsen]

On Friday 08 June 2007 10:07:20 am Gerard wrote:
> I noticed this on the FreeBSD site regarding the latest version of
> JAVA:
>
> January 24, 2007: Greg Lewis has released the fourth patchset
> (patchlevel 4, "Sumatran") for the JDK 1.5.0 software. This release
> builds with GCC 4 and includes a number of bug fixes.
>
> FreeBSD-6.2 does not come with GCC 4 or newer. While it is relatively
> trivial to install it manually, it then is necessary to make changes
> to the system /etc/make.conf file to insure its use. Wouldn't it be
> more efficient for the FreeBSD team to integrate GCC 4.3 (I think that
> is the latest stable version) into the base system? From what I have
> read, this latest version has some major improvements over its
> predecessors.

Chaning the major version number of the default system compiler is not 
something that is ever likely to happen on a -STABLE branch, which is what 
6.x is now.

GCC 4.2 has been imported into 7.0-CURRENT, and works well there. IIRC the 
plan is to have GCC 4.2.1 or similar for 7.0-RELEASE, but check the -current 
archives to verify.

And actually, I think you're mis-reading the announcement. The fact that it 
builds with gcc 4 is an improvement over the previous patchset which didn't. 
That does not mean that it requires gcc 4, and I see nothing in the port's 
Makefile to indicate that it requires any particular version of the compiler. 
Just "cd /usr/ports/java/jdk15 && make install clean" and you should be good 
to go (once you get all the source files downloaded manually...)

JN