FreeBSD Port: mplayer-0.99.11_14

[b. f.]

On 7/27/09, Andriy Gapon <avg at icyb.net.ua> wrote:

> Just curious, can't newer GCC(s) from ports be used to build those mplayer
> snapshots?
> We have:
> /usr/ports/lang/gcc42 <- 4.2.5
> /usr/ports/lang/gcc43 <- 4.3.4
> /usr/ports/lang/gcc44 <- 4.4.1
> /usr/ports/lang/gcc45 <- 4.5.0

We may have to USE_GCC , at least for some earlier supported versions
of the OS, if we want to retain some of the newer mplayer/mencoder
features.  (I was hoping to avoid this, but it may be the easiest way
to solve some problems.) But remember that the entire toolchain is
involved, not just the compiler -- our gcc ports are still wired by
default to our system gnu binutils, as is our base system compiler.
These older base system binutils lack support for some newer
instruction sets.  obrien@ said some time ago that he planned to
update them to the latest GPLv2 versions, but he didn't respond to my
later questions about progress on this front, so I'm assuming that
this will not happen soon, especially with the release engineering
that is now going on.   Now that we have a newer devel/binutils port,
we may be able to work around this -- for example, you can see how one
submitter is trying to incorporate SSE3 support in the old sources:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=ports/137043

As for the missing C99 features in our math and C libraries, we may be
able to compensate for them with compiler built-ins, but not all
versions of gcc have the necessary functions, nor are they present for
all architectures, because the built-ins weren't really intended to be
full replacements for library functions, but only to provide optimized
versions for some architectures.  And some of them are unfinished or
broken, even in the latest versions of gcc:

http://gcc.gnu.org/c99status.html

So there will probably still be some minor surgery that needs to be done.

b.