From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG  Wed Dec 14 01:30:50 2011
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Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 09:30:49 +0800 (CIT)
From: Gerald Pfeifer <gerald@pfeifer.com>
To: Thomas Mueller <mueller6727@bellsouth.net>
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Cc: ports@freebsd.org, Kevin Oberman <kob6558@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: lang/gcc46
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On Tue, 13 Dec 2011, Thomas Mueller wrote:
> I wondered why the ports collection used development snapshots of gcc 
> rather than stable releases.

All you _should_ need to run anything from the FreeBSD Ports Collection
is either the system compiler (GCC or clang) or lang/gcc all of which 
are updated very rarely.

Any other version of lang/gcc you need to use is indicative of an issue 
with some other port (short of the GNUstep ports which we are in the 
process of addressing now that lang/gcc also provide Objective-C).


In case you are interested, I have been spending quite some effort
over the last years to minimize the number of such ports and here
is the list of remaining ones:

  cad/salome/Makefile.ext		USE_GCC=4.4

  cad/sceptre/Makefile			USE_FORTRAN=g77
  graphics/p5-PGPLOT/Makefile		USE_FORTRAN=g77
  science/elmer-matc/Makefile		USE_FORTRAN=g77
  science/elmerpost/Makefile		USE_FORTRAN=g77

Without these, lang/gcc44 and lang/gcc34, respectively, could be 
obsoleted and removed.

Gerald