HEADS UP: gcc 4.1 and package builds

Kris Kennaway kris at obsecurity.org
Fri Sep 29 11:41:23 PDT 2006


On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 09:16:18PM -0400, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> If any of you are in the habit of monitoring pointyhat or derivative
> sites (portsmon, etc) for port failures, note that the current
> i386/7.0 build is using a snapshot of gcc 4.1 as part of plans to
> update the compiler in HEAD:
> 
>   http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/i386-7-latest/
> 
> I don't want to make this a focus of ports development yet, since we
> have 6.2 looming and people should be focusing on that instead.
> However, gcc 4.1 will be entering the tree some time soon (maybe after
> 6.2 is out), so it's something that people should be aware of; kan@
> hopes to distribute the patches soon for wider testing.
> 
> In the meantime you can get a head start on fixing the many problems
> that are coming to light with the new compiler (we're looking at maybe
> ~1000 new failures across the ports tree from the usual round of
> increased compiler strictness) by installing the gcc41 port and using
> that with CC=gcc41 and CXX=g++41 set (if your port does not respect
> these: shame on you and go and fix that too! :)
> 
> Since f77 will no longer be part of the base compiler suite, fortran
> ports will need to set the appropriate USE_GCC variable, and we'll
> likely need a bsd.gcc.mk tweak to force installation of the
> appropriate port on 7.0 versions without fortran support in the base.
> It would be great if someone who is interested in fortran support
> could look into that.

FYI, the build has now (just about) completed, so the full impact of
gcc 4.1 is becoming clear.  About 750 ports failed to build out of
12246 attempted, and those failures prevented the building of about
2600 ports in total.  Most of these extras are caused by the failure
of a few high-profile ports (accounting for this there are indeed
probably about ~1000 failures tree-wide).

Among the major causes of this "collateral damage" are:

firefox
mozilla
ghostscript
svgalib
xmms
some parts of gnome

To repeat, the gcc 4.1 import is not immanent but will happen on a
timescale of a month or two.  Anyone who wants to get a head start on
the problems shown by the package build will ease the lives of current
users later down the road :)

Kris
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