Re: Compiler for Red Hat Linux 8

[Andreas Jaeger <aj at suse dot de>]

Geoff, thanks for opening up this discussion.

Geoff Keating <geoffk@geoffk.org> writes:

> It's now time for us here at Red Hat to begin planning for the next
> major Red Hat Linux release.  One of the first questions that we're
> looking at is "which compiler should we use?"

[...]
> So, one plan being considered is that we take a compiler out of the
> Red Hat internal tree (based sometime after 3.0), make a release, and
> ship that as the default compiler.  Then if we can make the kernel
> work with this compiler, we have one compiler, which we can fully
> support.  We didn't have time to do either of these for RHL 7, but we
> do for RHL 8.

Going to GCC 3.0 is IMO the right way.
>
> The other problem with what we did for RHL 7 was that it was difficult
> for other distributors to be compatible with our system, because the
> 2.96 snapshot wasn't binary-compatible with any FSF release.  With the
> release of GCC 3.0, this shouldn't happen for the new compiler; other
> distributors will be able to use any 3.0-compatible compiler.

IMO we should broaden the issues a bit.  The issues you're facing will
be faced by all Linux distributors.  We should avoid a situation where
each distributor releases a GCC 3.0 version that is only compatible to
itself.  

I personally would appreciate - and support - a commitment from some
of the Linux distributors on the next GCC version they're using and on
compatibility to a *released* GCC version.

Compatibility between distributions is important and I'd even like to
see C++ specified in a newer revision of LSB (we didn't specify C++
for LSB 1.0 because of these incompatibilities).

IMO it would even make sense to discuss a "common Linux GCC" version.

> [I know IA64 has a completely different set of problems; I'm mostly
> concerned about IA32 and Alpha at this point, but if anyone has
> suggestions about IA64 we're happy to hear them; the main problem
> seems to be that the ABI for IA64 is still changing, but the internal
> tree is better for IA64 than the FSF releases at this point.  I also
> know about the glibc issues on all platforms, but that's a separate
> issue also.]
>
> So, how do people feel about this?  Does the SC have an opinion?

Andreas

P.S. I'm not speaking offically for SuSE here - but I'm biased ;-).
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger
  SuSE Labs aj@suse.de
   private aj@arthur.inka.de
    http://www.suse.de/~aj