Re: [PATCH 1/3] Introduce gdb::unique_ptr

[Pedro Alves <palves at redhat dot com>]

On 10/12/2016 11:51 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Would you please refrain from labeling my (or anyone else's) arguments
> with derogatory labels?  Please always assume that anything like that
> is due to some misunderstanding, not to anything else.

Will do, if you also start assuming good faith on my part.

> I have no reason to be sure that was tongue-in-cheek.  And I have no
> reason to regard as obvious that no one will be requiring C++17 any
> time soon, not without anyone, nor our coding standards, saying that.
> 
> So from my POV, that was no straw man argument at all.  Jan is one of
> the more influential developers here, so his opinions certainly have a
> significant weight with me.  I regard things that he writes very
> seriously.

OK.  I'll take that in consideration.

>> Fact: Nowhere did he say that we will now require GCC 6.1.
> 
> Not directly, no.  But C++14 is not fully supported until GCC 5,
> AFAIK, so who knows what C++17 might mean; it certainly does mean a
> new enough GCC version, possibly GCC 6 or newer.  Thus my reaction.

I think worrying about language version requirements is seeing
it backwards from what we should be looking at.  IMO, we should
be looking at the distribution sphere (and the distro versions people
are likely to be using/developing on, e.g., latest Ubuntu LTS, past
couple Fedora releases, etc.), and check what are the compiler versions
that  are shipped in them, either by default or as optional packages.
And then from that, decide which most up to date language version / 
features we can require (if we'd really want to use them).  I.e., if in 
5 years, virtually everyone has convenient access to an C++14 compiler, 
why not make use of C++14 features if they'd make our lives easier?

Thanks,
Pedro Alves