On Wed, 9 Jul 2003, Oscar Fuentes wrote:

> Thorbjorn Jemander <thje@enea.se> writes:
>
> The GCC C++ ABI change has nothing to do with the platform. NetBSD is
> not an exception. You must recompile all your C++ libraries if you
> want to use them with g++ v3.x.
>
> > why is NetBSD shipping with 2.95.3 and not some 3.x version?
>
> Maybe because 2.95.3 is the "recommended" compiler for building the
> kernel and other critical pieces of the system.

That's fairly circular reasoning.

The real reason is, that 2.95.3 was the latest offering at the time
NetBSD 1.6 was branched. NetBSD 2.0 (no release date), will likely
have integrated gcc 3.3.1 or thereabouts.

NetBSD is a complete system, that builds from identical source
on a dozen platforms and architectures, so we can't just update
the compiler "package" and then slap a +.1 on the collection. Rather,
everything has to build without warnings or errors on every platform.
A compiler upgrade is therefore a major undertaking, and so only
happens between major releases. There is a pkgsrc package for gcc-3.3
(several, actually), and gcc-3.3/3.3.1-prerelease seems to work well,
so I personally feel confident that all the rough edges will be worked
out by the time NetBSD 2.0 is released.

Frederick