which compilers do we want to support with KDE 4 ?

[Andy Fawcett]

On Sunday 22 January 2006 11:28, Andras Mantia wrote:
> On Sunday 22 January 2006 11:21, Gregory Hayes wrote:
> >  I also
> > doubt that any serious vendor, FreeBSD or otherwise, is going to
> > include < gcc 3.4 when KDE 4 is released.
>
> It was already mentioned, that it doesn't matter if in 2007 all major
> distributions (Linux or not) will have gcc 3.4 at least if now and
> for the next year there are KDE developers and contributors who don't
> have those versions.
> What I suggest is that KDE 4 should depend on the lowest version used
> in the current highest version of the distributions. So if (example,
> not researched):
> - FreeBSD 4.0 uses gcc 2.95.x

I think we most likely would have to drop support for this, especially 
if Trolltech would not support it for Qt (need to check that again, I 
can't recall the facts there)

> - FreeBSD 5.0 uses gcc 3.3

KDE/FreeBSD packagers typically only support the last couple of 
revisions of an OS branch, and 5.4 (the current most-recent) uses 3.4.2

> - Debian sarge uses gcc 3.4
> - Debian whatever uses gcc 4.0
> - SuSE 10.0 uses gcc 4.0
> - SuSE 10.1 uses gcc 4.1
>
> KDE should support gcc 3.3. Even if there are FreeBSD 4.0 versions
> around, there is a supported higher version of that OS. But there is
> no FreeBSD with gcc 3.4 or 4.0,

FreeBSD 5.4 has 3.4.2
FreeBSD 6.0 has 3.4.4


> so they cannot do anything to get a 
> version of the OS with that compiler (aside of manually upgrading the
> compiler, which many will not do).

This is the important part at least for the K/F packaging team. We don't 
want to have to force people to upgrade their compiler suites, because 
there are almost 14000 applications/suites in our packages, and 
virtually all are made to build on the system compiler. We only 
maintain the KDE ports and a few others, and we can't enforce a 
compiler change on the maintainers of other parts of the ports system. 

It would be interesting to hear from some of the packagers from other 
non-linux systems to see what they think on this.

Andy

-- 
Andy Fawcett                                     | andy at athame.co.uk
                                                 | tap at kde.org
"In an open world without walls and fences,      | tap at lspace.org
  we wouldn't need Windows and Gates."  -- anon  | tap at fruitsalad.org