Re: C++ ABI Issues

[Andreas Jaeger <aj at suse dot de>]

Mark Mitchell <mark@codesourcery.com> writes:

> [...]
> Certainly, one reasonable position is to do nothing.  Another is to
> (as several have suggested) support both modes (which seems like
> a good idea to me).  Another is my initial suggestion (to fix the
> problems right away.)  To me, the best argument for my suggestion is
> that at this point there aren't too many people dependent on 3.2; the
> longer we leave it around the harder it may to be change it later.

It's too late already. Some distributors, AFAIR including Mandrake and
Red Hat - have planned to switch to GCC 3.2 in August and announced
this during the discussion about 3.2.  SuSE has just done the step
internally and it's too late for such major changes, I don't think
that you can release a tested compiler with those bugfixes in a
timeframe that would make us happy.

>
> Your point, made previous by Joe, that we are likely to find more bugs,
> is also a very good one.
>
> I recently had discussions with folks at HP about what to do when these
> things come up.  They've got an almost-compliant compiler deployed in
> the field; so do we.  They're very interested in being compatible with
> GCC.  Nobody wants to break things for their users.  It's a difficult
> situation, and the discussions didn't reach an easy solution -- although
> everyone was very clear that the ultimate goal is to keep from messing
> up things for users.  I'd love it if we had a process in place to deal
> with these issues when they arise.
>
> I don't have a strong opinion about what we do at this point; I'm happy
> to see what the consensus is and do whatever that is.  At this point,
> it looks like people are leaning towards David's -fabi-with-fewer-bugs
> switch, which is fine by me.

Such a switch is fine with me,
Andreas
-- 
 Andreas Jaeger
  SuSE Labs aj@suse.de
   private aj@arthur.inka.de
    http://www.suse.de/~aj