Re: Clang

[Steven Chamberlain <steven@pyro.eu.org>]

On 23/06/13 13:00, Robert Millan wrote:
> 2013/6/23 Steven Chamberlain <steven@pyro.eu.org>:
>> so it may be more advantageous to instead try to make
>> 9.1 available through wheezy-backports.
> 
> You mean the kernel only? In my experience this is not as easy as it
> looks. A new kernel often drags in the rest of FreeBSD userland due to
> ABI changes.

Yes I meant the kernel only;  I was optimistically thinking they
wouldn't break ABI between minor versions but maybe that is fatally
wrong to assume.  I minimally tested running wheezy/sid system including
ZFS on a 9.1 kernel some months ago.


> If you want 9.1 in wheezy-backports, you can always try of course. But
> I wouldn't make plans based on the assumption that it will be
> possible.

I think I could accept the risk.  I only found one or maybe two things
that seemed viable to backport to 9.0, whereas many more people have
driver issues that only an upgrade to 9.1 could fix.


> OTOH, GCC diverges more and more from the old version they were using.
> Sounds like a potential source of trouble, and we've had serious
> problems in the past because of this.

I'm concerned by the rate that some things are changing recently, mostly
in packages that have close Debian/Ubuntu co-ordination (which includes
GCC), and it is usually at the expense of the architectures Ubuntu isn't
selling (which are only Linux i386/amd64/ARM).

There is expected to be a gcc-4.9 appear in the archive soon, and I
wonder if gcc-4.8 is really going to stay, remembering what happened
late in the wheezy release cycle.

This is very much a personal opinion but maybe clang-3.2 could be easier
to keep up with for the jessie cycle.  This puts me slightly in favour
of trying clang-3.2 but unfortunately it is a preference not based on
technical merit.

Regards,
-- 
Steven Chamberlain
steven@pyro.eu.org