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Re: gcc 3.2 transition in unstable



tag 175596 pending
thanks

On Mon, 2003-01-06 at 23:16, Steve Langasek wrote:

> This would be fine if the build-essential package declared 'c-compiler'
> or 'c++-compiler'.  It doesn't:  it declares a dependency on 'gcc' and
> 'g++', which always point to a specific version of gcc. 

There's a reason build-essential explicitly specifies gcc and g++; it's
because Debian in general explicitly allows the use of GNU tools.  We
depend on GNU make, allow packages to use GNU C extensions, allow
maintainer scripts to use more powerful extended GNU command line
arguments, have the GNU shell as an essential package, etc etc.

>  There's no
> reason why now, of all times, we would allow two different, quite
> incompatible versions of g++ to satisfy the build-essential
> requirements.

They're not incompatible if the program uses no libraries (other than
qt2).  And programs that *do* use libraries should explicitly declare a
Build-Depends on g++ 3.2, in my opinion.  

However, Ryan Murray disagrees with this.  His reasoning was:

<neuro> i'd rather see some bytes change in one packages entry, rather
than every sources entry for everything that uses C++

I personally disagree with this, but since he effectively maintains the
transition guide (and by extension conceptually the gcc 3.2 transition),
it is kind of his decision.

Since I feel that the effective build-time dependency on g++ 3.2 for
many C++-using packages should be expressed *somehow*, I am going to
update the build-essential package.  So unless anyone has anything new
to add (or objects to the change in build-essential), I believe we can
put this issue behind us.



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