On 12/13/2012 12:38, David Brown wrote:
On 13/12/2012 12:24, Steven Bosscher wrote:
On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 11:43 AM, John Marino wrote:
I don't speak for FreeBSD, but dropping them from Tier 1 support because
they don't use a GPLv3 *BASE* compiler is a bit vindictive.
FreeBSD has dropped GCC for future releases so there's no reason for
it to be a primary platform.
Yes there is good reason for keeping bsd targets. FreeBSD and others may
be moving to llvm, or using older gcc's, for their official binary
builds - but /users/ are still free to pick whatever tools they want.
They are also free to download the source of FreeBSD and compile it
themselves with gcc 4.8 fresh from svn.
This is exactly right and what I attempted to say earlier. Also, the
FreeBSD ports collection contains entries for gcc 3.4, 4.2, 4.4, 4.6,
4.7, and 4.8 (development) so the users would build from ports since gcc
typically needs a few patches on *BSD.
Dropping bsd as a target architecture just because the BSD distributions
don't use it is a bit like dropping support for targeting windows just
because Microsoft didn't use gcc to compile Windows 8.
It needs to be pointed out that while the base system can be built
without gcc, literally thousands of ports require GCC to build. It's
still in widespread use.
John
