From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Andreas Jaeger To: Geoff Keating Cc: gcc@gcc.gnu.org Subject: Re: Compiler for Red Hat Linux 8 Date: Wed, 18 Jul 2001 02:41:00 -0000 Message-id: References: <200107172020.NAA09154@geoffk.org> X-SW-Source: 2001-07/msg01256.html Geoff, thanks for opening up this discussion. Geoff Keating writes: > It's now time for us here at Red Hat to begin planning for the next > major Red Hat Linux release. One of the first questions that we're > looking at is "which compiler should we use?" [...] > So, one plan being considered is that we take a compiler out of the > Red Hat internal tree (based sometime after 3.0), make a release, and > ship that as the default compiler. Then if we can make the kernel > work with this compiler, we have one compiler, which we can fully > support. We didn't have time to do either of these for RHL 7, but we > do for RHL 8. Going to GCC 3.0 is IMO the right way. > > The other problem with what we did for RHL 7 was that it was difficult > for other distributors to be compatible with our system, because the > 2.96 snapshot wasn't binary-compatible with any FSF release. With the > release of GCC 3.0, this shouldn't happen for the new compiler; other > distributors will be able to use any 3.0-compatible compiler. IMO we should broaden the issues a bit. The issues you're facing will be faced by all Linux distributors. We should avoid a situation where each distributor releases a GCC 3.0 version that is only compatible to itself. I personally would appreciate - and support - a commitment from some of the Linux distributors on the next GCC version they're using and on compatibility to a *released* GCC version. Compatibility between distributions is important and I'd even like to see C++ specified in a newer revision of LSB (we didn't specify C++ for LSB 1.0 because of these incompatibilities). IMO it would even make sense to discuss a "common Linux GCC" version. > [I know IA64 has a completely different set of problems; I'm mostly > concerned about IA32 and Alpha at this point, but if anyone has > suggestions about IA64 we're happy to hear them; the main problem > seems to be that the ABI for IA64 is still changing, but the internal > tree is better for IA64 than the FSF releases at this point. I also > know about the glibc issues on all platforms, but that's a separate > issue also.] > > So, how do people feel about this? Does the SC have an opinion? Andreas P.S. I'm not speaking offically for SuSE here - but I'm biased ;-). -- Andreas Jaeger SuSE Labs aj@suse.de private aj@arthur.inka.de http://www.suse.de/~aj