From mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Wed Jun 9 13:57:27 2010 Message-ID: <4C0FD5A0.7030809@atari-source.org> Date: Wed, 09 Jun 2010 13:55:44 -0400 From: Mark Duckworth User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100317 Thunderbird/3.0.4 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: mint@lists.fishpool.fi Subject: Re: [MiNT] MiNTLib 0.59.1 for your testing pleasure.... References: <4C0FC5E4.5040306@freesbee.fr> In-Reply-To: <4C0FC5E4.5040306@freesbee.fr> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi Errors-to: mint-bounce@lists.fishpool.fi X-original-sender: mduckworth@atari-source.org Precedence: bulk List-help: List-unsubscribe: List-Id: X-List-ID: List-subscribe: List-owner: List-post: On 6/9/10 12:48 PM, Vincent Rivière wrote: > Keith Scroggins wrote: >> I would be surprised if all of those packages would fail to build in >> GCC4. Others can speak to this more than I can, but there is not a >> huge compatibility gap, unless there is assembly in the code. > > The incompatibilities are: > > 1) As Keith said, inline assembly has to be revisited. It is only > present in very low-level packages, and the job has already been done > in the MiNTLib, GemLib, FreeMiNT... So I'm sure there is not much > inline assembly remaining in the packages. > > 2) The aggressive strict aliasing optimization enabled by default. > This causes compile time warnings and sometimes bugs. If bugs are > encountered, we can turn off that optimization manually with > -fno-strict-aliasing and see if things improves. Then fix the source > of the bug with the help of the warnings. > > I don't know anything else. These 2 kind of fixes will improve the > code quality, the sources will remain compatible with GCC 2.x. > > Also, all the GNU/Linux packages have been fixed for GCC 4.x long ago, > so the updated packages should compile out of the box. Alan can give > us his experience on Gentoo. The big problem is the obsolescence of > the MiNTLib/fdlibm versus Linux's GLIBC, but this is unrelated to GCC > itself. > > However, there is still an important bug with GCC 4.x: the debug info > produced in STABS format is often invalid. This cause GDB 5.x crashing > or saying "cannot set breakpoint" or so on. GDB 7.x only produces a > warning, but I have not finished porting it. Since this bug is > specific to the obsolete a.out code generation in GCC, we can be sure > no official developer would look at it. However, I have not fully > investigated that issue, neither posted a bug report. > I definitely see it as prudent to enforce gcc 4.x compatibility with all sparemint packages but at the same time provide gcc 2.95.3 as a non-default compiler for user use. That should make all parties happy I think. Thanks, Mark