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Re: -= PROPOSAL =- Release sarge with amd64



Colin Watson wrote:
>Judging from conversation on debian-glibc, it sounds like AMD64 really
>wants to use gcc 3.4, which is not tenable for sarge because it involves
>an API change (see Matthias Klose's recent mail to debian-release and
>debian-glibc). Can you explain how critical this is to the port?

There are minor ABI changes from gcc-3.3 to gcc-3.4 on some 
architectures (MIPS/SPARC).
I doubt that those ABI changes will affect many libraries (They 
basically involve the direct use of structs and unions as function 
parameters, e.g. 'void f(struct s x)' - not pointer arguments like 
'void f(struct s *x)'.)

I fail to see why the amd64 port cannot use gcc-3.4. The amd64 port 
may use gcc-3.4 while the other architectures still use gcc-3.3.

There is no compatibility problem with gcc-3.4 on amd64 - there is not 
even an official port yet. Even if there would be an official 
amd64 port already, the gcc-3.3 and gcc-3.4 compilers seem to coexist 
without problems on amd64.

I recompiled my own private amd64 archive using gcc-3.4 
and it worked quite well. There are some minor issues like some stricter 
warnings and error messages and I am currently filing bug reports for 
the affected packages (thanks to all maintainers who already responded to 
those bug reports!). 

gcc-3.4 has much better support for the amd64 architecture and
I really do not see any reason why it should not be used on amd64.

Regards
Andreas Jochens



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