Re: gcc4: Time to drop gcc3 from the distro?

[Dave Korn <dave.korn.cygwin@gmail.com>]

On 03/09/2011 09:42, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> On Sep  2 22:15, Dave Korn wrote:
>> On 02/09/2011 19:40, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
>>> As the subject says, shouldn't we remove gcc3 from the distro finally?
>>> We have 3 mingw compilers and gcc4 for Cygwin.  What reason is left
>>> to stick to gcc 3?
>>   Well, it's the only support we have for Pascal and D.
> 
> Hmm.  And I don't see a Modula-2 compiler in gcc4 either.  All of them
> exist as gcc frontends.  I guess it's just lack of maintainers for
> these packages which keeps them from being in the distro?

  No, it's lack of upstream development.  GM2 and GPC appear to have been
utterly dormant projects for quite some years now and won't build against
recent GCC versions (GM2 works up to GCC-4.1.2, GPC up to some random date in
early 2006).  It takes a good deal of effort to keep a front-end up-to-date
against mainline GCC development and they clearly just haven't had the
manpower.  That's why I had to stop packaging them in gcc4 releases.  We've
got the 3.4 releases, it didn't seem worthwhile making a special separate
release just for the 3.4->4.1 change in the only one of the three languages
that could be updated at all at the time.

  On the other hand I just found that D development has been resumed and it's
been brought up to date with everything including gcc 4.6 series, so I plan to
bring that back in the next gcc4 release :)

    cheers,
      DaveK