Quo vadis, -CURRENT? (recent changes to cc & compatibility)

[Daniel Eischen]

On Wed, 10 Sep 2003, Michael Nottebrock wrote:
> Sorry if this sounds a bit flame-ish, but the way I see it we now have a
> system compiler in -CURRENT that doesn't even compile a hello world if
> -pedantic is specified and breaks with lots of existing software out there
> that tries to use a threads library because -pthread errors out (why could 
> this change not have been made _after_ 4.9 is out the door, btw.? Or before 
> 5.0-R FWIW.)

It should have been made 2 years ago, a few months after libc_r
became disconnected from libc.  There was a whole thread about
how ports should be using PTHREAD_LIBS and not using -pthread.
Here is the link:

  http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=629118+0+archive/2001/freebsd-current/20010218.freebsd-current

As to the timing; it had to happen soon.  We need time to
iron out the problems before 5.2-RELEASE.  This was the
first step; there may be a little more pain in the future
but this needed to be addressed first.

> Are we expecting people to be able to compile software directly from the
> commandline at all these days and in the future on a (stable) FreeBSD-5?
> 
> Is the decision criterion for making acceptable changes to core system
> components that we can somehow make 3rd party software compiling via
> ports-collection hacks?

Things need to get worse before they can get better.  If
I didn't break -pthread, ports@ would have a harder time
trying to make things build with a threading library that
is selectable via PTHREAD_LIBS.  We've had 2.5 years to
do this, but now it needs to get done before 5.2-RELEASE.

> I feel that a FreeBSD that manages to break so many existing configure-scripts
> and build systems is degraded in usefulness.

Please, this is -current.  If you want less pain then stick
with -stable and you won't be annoyed by the -pthread removal.

-- 
Dan Eischen