Re: gcc-2.96-nn status

[Seth Mos <knuffie@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 21:26 18-9-2001 +0200, Jean Francois Martinez wrote:
> Seth Mos a écrit :
>
> > At 13:02 18-9-2001 -0400, Arun Ramakrishnan wrote:
> > >Hi,
> > >     I heard that 2.96 is again a devel version of gcc which is sorta
> > > unstable.I
> >
> > It was a CVS snapshot.
> >
>
> It was a CVS snapshot some 18 months ago.  Eighteen months of bug hunting
> later you can tell nothing about its stability.  In fact because Gcc 2.96 was
> frozen
> over a year before gcc 3.0  and has been far more dceployed I trust it far m
> ore than gcc 3.0+

True, but I gather 3.0+ will pop up in a lot more distributions then just 
redhat and mandrake.
3.0 is a official release which means it is not distribution specific. The 
reason that mandrake adopted is was more or less because a lot of mandrake 
is still redhat based. (no flame intended)

The gcc people are working hard on getting 3.0 stable. Most kernel 
developers I met only work with official compilers. Not with wat shipped 
with their distro.

> > >heard posting saying that we shud downgrade to 2.95 possibly.I think with
> > >RH 7.1
> > >,u no longer need kgcc to compile things correctly.gcc itself works.In 
> fact,i
> >
> > For most userland programs it seems to be fine but I have encounterd some
> > utilities that don't like it.
>
> Gcc 2.96 requires C++ functions being declared before their use.   I have 
> found
> many programs who need to be fixed.

The same for gcc-3.0

> > For kernels kgcc might be a better solution.
>
> The only gcc tested by kernel people are egcs and gcc 2.95.  There is ever a
> danger kernel
> will break if compiled with a different compiler.  On another hand gcc 
> 2.96 has
> been used in
> the two most popular Linux distributions so is a good test bench.

Expect more reports of 3.0 when that turns up in a new distribution.

> > >heard sby commenting that now kgcc seems broke in RH 7.1 and so it is 
> safe to
> > >use only gcc in RH 7.1;while it was mandatory  to use kgcc in RH 7.0!!!!
> >
> > Not that I know off.
>
> AFAIK kgscc is no longer shipped with 7.1.

[seth@stimpy /data]$ which kgcc
/usr/bin/kgcc
[seth@stimpy /data]$ cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Linux release 7.1 (Seawolf)
[seth@stimpy /data]$ rpm -ql compat-egcs|grep kgcc
/usr/bin/kgcc
[seth@stimpy /data]$

>   Reason kgcc was in 7.0 was because
> gcc 2.96 did not compile kernel 2.2.  gcc 2.96 had its bugs but in that 
> case it
> was due
> to broken code in kernel that old more tolerant compilers accepted but 
> should not
> have.
> kernel 2.4 has no longer this problem.

It's called compat-egcs for exactly that reason. It is a compatibility 
package including libs to compile  packages for redhat 6.2 environments.

> -march=i686.   This will be a bit faster than  compiling for i686.   Gcc 
2.96
> genrates faster code than egcs but if you are wary of it the above is the best
> solution

Comromises build the world
--
Seth
Every program has two purposes one for which
it was written and another for which it wasn't
I use the last kind.