Why no compat-gcc-3.4.3-22.fc4.i386.rpm ?

Dan Williams dcbw at redhat.com
Fri Jun 24 03:20:44 UTC 2005


On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, John Ellson wrote:

> Since the latest official update to gcc on FC3 was to 
> gcc-3.4.3-22.fc3.i386.rpm
> why is there no compat-gcc-3.4.3-22.fc4.i386.rpm for FC4 ?
> 
> Some colleagues are stuggling with some C++ programs are are not yet 
> ready for gcc-4.0.0, but
> apparently gcc32 is too old.

The issue here is one of binary compatibility.  gcc 3.2 and gcc 3.3 were not 
that much different, and gcc 3.4 and gcc 4.0 are not that much different.

Where large differences occurred was between 3.3 and 3.4.  We can't ship compat 
versions of every compiler, so we have to pick and choose.

I'd note that for OpenOffice.org, which happens to be 7 million lines of C++, 
there was a _huge_ patch for gcc 3.4 compatibility, but the patch for 4.0 has 
mostly been naming anonymous enums (ie, instead of "enum {...};" it now has to 
be "enum foobar {...};").

If we can do OpenOffice.org for gcc 4.0 in a week, others can certainly do their 
C++ programs which aren't near that size.  So the answer here is really "fix 
your code", since you already did most of the work porting to gcc 3.4.

Dan




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