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List:       wine-devel
Subject:    Re: GCC 4.3 support and language features
From:       Gerald Pfeifer <gerald () pfeifer ! com>
Date:       2023-11-22 21:53:02
Message-ID: 4dc4f14b-1ef0-3913-b5f8-9c2fa14073de () pfeifer ! com
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On Mon, 13 Nov 2023, Gabriel Ivăncescu wrote:
>> The oldest GCC release series I would remotely consider supporting is GCC
>> 8 which wend end of life mid 2021, though it's really not unreasonable to
>> focus on GCC 11 and later.
> Sorry, what? Some distros have 10 year long-term support. Not everything is
> rolling release, nor should it be, not even close.

I know.

In fact I happen to work for one of the Linux distros with the longest, if 
not the longest, support cycles.

> I mean, compiling or backporting compilers isn't that big of a deal but the
> main problem with new compilers on old platforms is that you might need new
> core libraries (libc, libstdc++, etc) because of how GCC works.

We (SUSE in this case, and I believe it similarly holds for Red Hat) do 
provide newer toolchains for older distros. And we do so in a way that 
users are fully covered and don't need to build or replace system 
components on their own.

> Having multiple libc side-by-side is difficult, and updating such a core 
> component in a stable distro is way too much to ask.

libc generally isn't affected, though we have been updating it in some 
cases, and we take care of the default run-time libraries to be suitable 
for both the older and newer toolschains. (The GNU toolchain puts quite 
some focus on backwards compatibility of run time components.)

Gerald



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