From owner-freebsd-questions Sun May 12 09:38:41 1996 Return-Path: owner-questions Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA28855 for questions-outgoing; Sun, 12 May 1996 09:38:41 -0700 (PDT) Received: from palmer.demon.co.uk (palmer.demon.co.uk [158.152.50.150]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA28845 for ; Sun, 12 May 1996 09:38:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from palmer.demon.co.uk (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by palmer.demon.co.uk (sendmail/PALMER-1) with ESMTP id RAA07498 ; Sun, 12 May 1996 17:26:26 +0100 (BST) To: " Stephen P. Butler" cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: "Gary Palmer" Subject: Re: GCC version with FreeBSD. In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 11 May 1996 21:01:48 BST." Date: Sun, 12 May 1996 17:26:25 +0100 Message-ID: <7496.831918385@palmer.demon.co.uk> Sender: owner-questions@FreeBSD.ORG X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk " Stephen P. Butler" wrote in message ID : > The NEWS file supplied with GCC 2.7.2 says that FreeBSD on x86 support > was added with version 2.7.0, but FreeBSD seems to ship with version > 2.6.3. Are there any particular reasons for this or have the > distributions just not been updated yet? Several reasons: - We looked at 2.7.0 and 2.7.1 when the both came out, and didn't want to move to them as they both had more bugs than the 2.6.3 that we are shipping now. 2.7.2 is probably a bit better than 2.6.3, but: - Munging the GCC source distribution into a bmake (Berkeley make, i.e. what FreeBSD uses) is quite, err, ``interesting''. - There have been a significant number of changes to GCC which mean that it would take some work to get the tree up to speed with 2.7.2, and (probably) even more work to find an eliminate the subbtle bugs that -Wall can't find as they are to do with having inline asm in the code (and possibly other interactions between GCC and our system) So the real problem is that no-one who has the required knowledge to properly import 2.7.2 (without taking -current out of the water for an extended period) has the time to do it as they all have a lot on their plate. You have also to remember that GNU expect you to upgrade your whole toolkit when you move to 2.7.2, and moving our as and ld (the latter having undergone a LOT of work to fix some annoying problems with it) would be no simple matter. Gary -- Gary Palmer FreeBSD Core Team Member FreeBSD: Turning PC's into workstations. See http://www.FreeBSD.ORG/ for info