Re: GCC and as

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 05/13, Jason Bacon wrote:
> The problem is actually more widespread than I realized.  I found
> more failures in the logs from my 2018Q1 bulk builds, including
> qt5-qtbase, which prevented several other packages from building on
> CentOS 6.
> 
> I'd like to get a patch into all the GCC packages ASAP.
> 
> Does anyone have suggestions for improving on the patch above? After
> giving it a little thought, I don't like the idea of directly
> checking the version of tool chains outside pkgsrc, as they may
> change or even be removed unbeknownst to pkgsrc.  I think
> consistently using pkgsrc binutils when Enterprise Linux is detected
> will lead to the fewest problems.

Hi, Jason!

Hmm, to me this doesn't seem like the best way to go.  I would be
in favor of checking for the feature you need rather than the OS.
Or in this case, if you need a minimum version of binutils, I think
it's better to check the binutils version rather than the OS version.
This seems similar to the principle of checking for the feature in an
Autotools configure script rather than checking for the OS as noted in
the pkgsrc guide in section 11.3.4, Patching guidelines, at:

  http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/components.html#components.patches.guidelines

Regards,

Lewis