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Re: RFC: requiring GCC >= 4.7 to build glibc


On Mon, 5 Oct 2015, Florian Weimer wrote:

> On 08/20/2015 03:51 PM, Joseph Myers wrote:
> > For glibc 2.21 we increased the minimum GCC version for building glibc to 
> > 4.6.  There's one major GCC release a year, so the correspondingly old 
> > version for glibc 2.23 would be GCC 4.7.  What do people think about 
> > increasing the minimum version requirement?
> 
> Somewhat related: I find it rather odd that we are very conservative
> when it comes to pushing the minimum requirement for GCC, but are very
> aggressively requiring newer binutils versions.  As a result, it is
> quite difficult to find stock systems which can build glibc and actually
> have older GCC versions.

As I said in <https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-alpha/2015-08/msg00917.html>, 
I think a move to a binutils 2.23 version requirement for glibc 2.23 would 
be reasonable.  GCC 4.7 and binutils 2.23 are of similar vintage (both 
released in 2012), as are the current requirements of 4.6 and 2.22, so I 
don't see a substantial difference there (the binutils release is about 
seven months newer).  I didn't propose a binutils version requirement 
increase simply because I don't have list of cleanups to hand that it 
would enable, whereas I could easily do a ten-patch (approximately) series 
of cleanups facilitated by an increase to the GCC version requirement 
without needing to hunt through configure scripts for obsolete configure 
tests.

Are you saying that binutils 2.22 support is in fact already broken (which 
is something I'd take as evidence to justify such a move - that people are 
actually using features in glibc that 2.22 doesn't have)?

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com


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