Re: C++ ABI Issues

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub at redhat dot com>]

On Mon, Aug 26, 2002 at 05:10:19PM -0700, Joe Buck wrote:
> A more controversial possibility is to add an *option* to correct the
> ABI bugs in 3.2.1, but make 3.2 compatibility the default.  I'm less
> sure whether this is the right approach; we should first try to determine
> how pervasive this problem is.  One possibility: do the ABI-warning patch,
> ask our friends at Red Hat, Debian, and FreeBSD to build their whole
> distributions+ports with it and see how many warnings we get.  If it

This is what we at Red Hat are about to do today.

Personally, I think there is no point to make 3.3 ABI incompatible
with 3.2 without extensive ABI testsuite in place (and I don't think it
is manageable to come up with one in 3.3 timeframe unless it is delayed),
otherwise we're back where G++ used to be - every single version is ABI
incompatible with all the others. The chances some ABI problem will come
up in the next half a year is simply too high without testsuite.
So IMHO the ABI changes could wait for 3.4 together with ABI testsuite.

	Jakub