Re: Potato and egcs
On Sun, 4 Apr 1999, Stephen Pitts wrote:
> First, don't complain. One of the listed goals for potato on
> debian-devel (you do read that, don't you? potato is a DEVELOPERS RELEASE)
I used to follow it quite regularly as a newfeed from fuller but the devel
traffic is cone now and I am not going to subscribe right now as a mailing
list because I am already swamped from about 4 lists that I am on.
> is to use EGCS for compilation. Use Slink if you can't handle occasional
> system breaks. Also, don't start blaming people left and right. You
> are the one who chose to upgrade your GCC.
>
But the kernel is not designed to be made with EGCS, it is designed for
GCC. Many older kernels will break if you try to build them with EGCS
(there is still a lot of 1.2.13 kernels about)
If Linus switched the kernel development to EGCS I would not have a
problem with it but right now he still uses GCC and there are still weird
kernel problems when people use EGCS. (You DO read the kernel development
list, don't you?). You are going to end up causing a bunch of problems
for people because you forced them to a different compiler without them
fully understanding that the new compiler is different or what the
differences are.
They are going to think they are seeing kernel problems when they are
seeing compiler problems. One of the resons for this is that a kernel is
much different than an application program. Sometimes one takes advantage
of the way a particular compiler optimizes things to get fancy with the
resulting machine code. If you change compilers, these things may break.
You can move them around for the new compiler but then they will break if
built on the old compiler. The point is that there are many that are using
EGCS with kernels without problems but there are as many that do have
problems and it all depends on how you configured the kernel build. You
don't have a problem but I use different features and I do have a problem.
Until Linux development is done with EGCS, you can expect me not to use
it. I would appreciate having a choice in Potato becuase I do not want to
see GCC go away when Slink goes away from the archives. You can make EGCS
the default, but please give me the choice of using GCC until Linux kernel
development officially moves to EGCS.
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