[GRASS5] C and C++ compiler changes?

[Thierry Laronde]

On Wed, Oct 22, 2003 at 06:06:25PM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote:
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> Thierry Laronde wrote:
> > But unfortunately, GCC 3.3.1 for example has some bugs in optimization
> > and inlining meaning that we will have some rough times with compilation
> > failures reports that may be caused by bugs in the compiler and not in
> > the code (for example some version(s) of glibc doesn't compile with it
> > and one can compile a Linux kernel with it that will cause bugs (in my
> > case this was reboot) : but compilation succeeds...; so imagine the
> > hell if a glibc compiles but is buggy!).
> 
> The whole of Mandrake Linux is compiled with gcc-3.3.1 (probably with
> quite a few patches from cvs), and there haven't been any bugs found
> recently (2 months or so) that were traced to gcc.

Perhaps, but one bird doesn't mean spring has came. Note that a recent
Mandrake is shipped with a gcc-3.3.1, _but_ 3.3.2 fixes important bugs.
And we don't know what version (with patches or not) of the libc
software have been compiled against (since gcc-3.3.1 INSTALL says don't
try to compile the new libc this will lead to problems, while glibc 
INSTALL says get the latest version of gcc...).

Perhaps this very version shipped with Mandrake has the right fixes but
since a majority of the people who will compile their software are the
ones who will fearlessly try to compile glibc and gcc on their own
(perhaps simply because package foo says `I need glibc latest') they
will have new libc static and shared to link against and everything will
go live.

This is not a criticism against Mandrake or others, this is just a
caveats: we need to know with every report what are the compiler
(origine and version) and the libc (and by the way the locales too
since running anything other than `env LC_ALL=C LANGUAGE=C ./configure
[options]' is problematic too). 

And perhaps should we recommend a particular version of the compiler 
(and at least "our" build daemons need to run a fairly stable version 
of an ANSI C (C++) compiler with a fairly stable libc so that we can 
ship binaries for the ones unable to compile).

Cheers,
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde at polynum.org>
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