On 15:17 Mon 30 Aug , Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote: > Hi all, > > There is an open request[1] to bump the minimum GCC version from 5 to 6. > We've traditionally been very conservative with supporting old GCC > versions, but GCC 6 was released in 2016 (compared to GCC 5 in 2015), > and I think this sounds conservative enough. > > Would it create a lot of problems for anyone if we raised the minimum > version? > > /Magnus > > [1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8256977 >
Is this just for HEAD (i.e. OpenJDK 18 on)? I don't think it's appropriate to change the requirements for older released versions. I think what compilers are supported tends to be determined less by dictat and more by need. If there are active maintainers building with GCC < 6, then they will report build failures and (ideally) fixes. If no-one is actively building on a particular setup, it will often start to fail without any realising, through no real fault of anyone making changes. For example, we had a recent change in 8u that broke older systems (a C library rather than compiler issue in this case), and this was resolved by people reporting the failure. It wasn't obvious in a code review of the original patch, as it was to do with a macro being undefined in certain circumstances, so I can't see that it would have been caught unless someone was actively maintaining builds on those older platforms. Thanks, -- Andrew :) Pronouns: he / him or they / them Senior Free Java Software Engineer OpenJDK Package Owner Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com) PGP Key: ed25519/0xCFDA0F9B35964222 (hkp://keys.gnupg.net) Fingerprint = 5132 579D D154 0ED2 3E04 C5A0 CFDA 0F9B 3596 4222
