Proposal: USE_GNU89 switch

[Gerald Pfeifer]

Hi Ed et al,

On Fri, 29 May 2009, Ed Schouten wrote:
> I've been looking through /usr/ports/Mk. I suspect such a switch should 
> be added to bsd.gcc.mk? I'm sending this message to gerald@ as well, 
> because I've been told he is the maintainer of various GCC related bits.

I noticed a patch for this was committed now, which is fine.  Thanks
for including me in this, I just did not have much to offer after seeing
the other responses come in.

> We've noticed some ports (probably less than 100) really depend on
> GNU-style inlining. One option would be to just ignore the issue, but
> this will cause problems in the future anyway (by the time GCC itself
> will switch to gnu99).

Another approach would be updating those ports where applicable (some
may have newer versions in the tree already?) or deprecating them.  In
my experience, we carry ports around which nobody seems to use, and 
nobody definitely cares about them.

So, I'd suggest to mail the maintainers of those that have one and see
what they'll do about it and deprecate those (un)maintained by ports at .
I know that sounds somewhat drastic :-), but I am mostly serious.

(There may be some exceptions, but I predict that most of these ports
really could go away with hardly anyone noticing.)

Gerald
-- 
Gerald (Jerry) Pfeifer   gerald at pfeifer.com   http://www.pfeifer.com/gerald/