[ale] Moving Right Along..

[Chris Ricker]

On Mon, 20 Jul 1998, Dave Brooks wrote:

> Well, all this being true, the bottom line (most likely) is "The latest
> stable kernels -will not- compile with the latest C compilers."  Does that
> then in fact make them stable?  Seems rather oxymoronic to me.  *shrug*

Two things to keep in mind.

(1) The latest stable C compiler is gcc 2.7.2.3[1].  A compiler's stability
is not something that is determined by a couple of month's casual usage and
gcc 2.8.x is simply not stable.  There's plenty of code floating around
which is good but will not compile under it to attest to that, and more pop
up all the time (including a report on linux-kernel today about INN not
compiling with gcc 2.8.1).  Egcs is a lot better, at least in my personal
experience.  I use it on several different platforms and have been doing so
for several months, but I still wouldn't call it stable.  It simply hasn't
undergone the years of testing the gcc 2.7 has.

(2) The changes necessary for 2.0.x to compile cleanly and safely with gcc
2.8 / egcs are simply too involved to make in a stable kernel. We've got a
couple of years of testing on 2.0.x now, and have pretty much worked out all
the bugs.  You're going to throw all that hard work out the window if you
make the necessary changes just to add support for a new compiler.  That
said, you can probably compile 2.0.35 with egcs 1.02 or greater without
problems (I've got linux boxes with months uptime compiled with egcs), but
it's entirely reasonable for the kernel developers to ignore bug reports
from such a configuration until you show that it is reproducible with gcc
2.7.2.3.

later,
chris

[1] Yes, I am aware than only egcs is available as a precompiled binary on
tsx-11 and mirrors.  That doesn't mean it's stable.  I think H.J.'s been a
little premature in removing 2.7.2.3 from the archives.

--
Chris Ricker                                            kaboom at gatech.edu

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