Rainer Orth wrote: > George Vasick <George.Vasick at sun.com> writes: > >> Alan Coopersmith wrote: >>> You really need both 4.3.2 & 4.3.3? >> My first choice would have been to replace the current gcc 3.4.3 with >> gcc 4.X and simply called it gcc. However, gcc 3.4.3 is part of the >> Solaris build environment and we must keep it until Solaris moves to a >> newer version of gcc. > > How's the progress with moving ON (and perhaps other consolidations, I > don't know if they use GCC at all or rather prefer the Studio compilers) > from GCC 3 to GCC 4?
Delayed a little. We lost a resource recently and we are still playing catch up. > >> The other aspect is customer support. We have customers who want to be >> able to test with a new compiler release while continuing to use their >> current release for production. We even have customers who want a >> specific bug fix back ported to their specific version of the compiler. >> They will not take the next update no matter how small the version >> number change is. > > This may be a point where we have to say: this might have to be Sun's > problem, not the communities, especially if the current solution is so > incompatible with the way any other product is handled. This would be an > issue for my other examples as well: how do you handle this e.g. in > PostgreSQL? Or just let those customers not update they GCC installation > and keep it the way it is. I don't see the incompatibility for users with just one gcc version installed. For users who need multiple versions for what ever reason, we'd like to provide that capability. > >> > You don't believe even >>> micro releases are not safe or compatible upgrades? That's >>> just sad, and somewhat inconsistent with every other distro/OS >>> shipping gcc I've seen. (3.4.3 vs. 4.3.3, sure, but not >>> 4.3.2 vs. 4.3.3.) >> Solaris freezes on a specific release for its build compiler. What >> happens when they are on 4.x.y and we want to release 4.x.z? > > Right, but even with the Studio compilers, this was handled by a special > distribution that included particular patches necessary for building ON. I > don't think this special requirement should affect all users of Solaris. Yes, you are 100% corrected on the studio side. For gcc, the build uses the compiler installed on the live system. I don't know why the two are handled differently. We do need to accommodate Solaris builds, however. They are one of our important users. George > > Rainer >
