Compiler version

[Raphael Kubo da Costa]

Martin Gräßlin <mgraesslin at kde.org> writes:

> What about freebsd? Personally I am not willing to support that platform
> anymore if it would mean that we have to restrict ourself to an outdated gcc
> version. Reasons why in general I would find it acceptable to drop support for
> non-linux in KWin are outlined in a recent discussion on plasma mailing list
> [1].
>
> @Raphael any idea about that?

In the future, the idea is to use clang instead of gcc by default, but I
wouldn't count on that for this decision: there's still work to do, and
even when a new FreeBSD comes out with clang as the default compiler
we'll still have to support a few older releases with gcc 4.2 anyway.

That said, it wouldn't really be a problem if a newer gcc was required;
we do have many different gcc release series in the ports system
(including 4.7.x and 4.8 snapshots) and in the end users will simply
have to use them to build KDE instead.

As for the Plasma post, there's ongoing work towards having recent X.org
releases, as well as improving support for KMS and things like that
(AFAICT the NVidia binary blog probably already works fine, and I am
using KMS with an Intel graphics card myself with Mesa 7.11.2, with
updates on the way). The KMS code might not apply to all supported
FreeBSD versions, but this is something that will be automatically
solved with time -- other than that, I don't really know what difference
it all would make for KWin and workspace in general (I'm not subscribed
to plasma-devel, but I can do that or you guys can CC me if you prefer
to continue this part of the discussion elsewhere).