Re: pkg/42727 (gcc 34 does not compile)

[John Marino <marino%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 12/20/2011 9:56 PM, David Holland wrote:
>   >   What is the minimum platform requirement for NetBSD?
>   >   Fixing 3.4 would not be trivial.  Compiler work in general is very
>   >   difficult and time consuming.  Upgrading florist and removing
>   >   gcc34-based Ada should be the long-term plan here.
>
> Ok then, the submitter should use gnat-aux. I hadn't realized gcc3-ada
> and gcc34-ada were deprecated; we should wait until after 2011Q4 is
> branched before ripping them (both?) out, but then we should probably
> go ahead and nuke them.

Ada is an ISO standard language.  The first version was approved in 
1983, and
the second version was Ada-1995.  The third version is Ada-2005, approved in
2007, and Ada-2012 draft was just approved last week.  GCC 3.3.6 and
GCC 3.4.x would not support Ada-2005, which was a milestone.  I didn't call
these compilers "deprecated", but it's not a bad description.  They would
probably be fine for Ada-83 and Ada-95 programs, but then again I don't know
how much testing those compilers were put through.  When I got GNAT, the BSD
support was terrible.  No NetBSD, no OpenBSD, FreeBSD was there but
broken, it was a mess.  I still have to fix things now and then, so I 
suspect these
GCC 3.x compilers weren't perfect anyway.

On top of all that, it seems the original committer isn't maintaining 
them.  That
said, supporting NetBSD 4.0 is not trivial.  There's a lot of 
platform-specific
configuration.  Even between 5.1 and 5.99 there were several platform
changes I had to account for.


>   >   As an aside, the next release of gnat-aux is available and it adds
>   >   Fortran and Objective-C on top of the C, C++, and Ada that
>   >   gnat-aux-20110627 provides, so it's really a top class compiler.
>   >   The only question is if I will be allowed to get it into Q4 due to
>   >   the freeze.  I think at a minimum I would need to build all Ada
>   >   packages on both NetBSD 5.99 and DragonFly-master before this is
>   >   considers.
>
> That is the sort of thing that should wait until after the freeze.
Yeah.  The counter-argument is that C++, Objc, and fortran aren't built by
default and the Ada code between gcc 4.6.1 and 4.6.2 is identical for all
intents and purposes.  The bug fixes were on the middle- and back-ends, so
the "risk" for a mid-freeze upgrade is nearly nil, and the reward is two
additional optional languages.  Something to think about.  I'm in the 
middle
of a libm upgrade for DragonFly though (brought on by Fortran support,
continued for C99 support) so it's hard to get the time for the full 
testing
that it should have.

John