Re: C++ binary compatibility between GCC 3.1 and GCC 3.2?

[Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr at codesourcery dot com>]

Andreas Jaeger <aj@suse.de> writes:

| Gabriel Dos Reis <gdr@codesourcery.com> writes:
| 
| > Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com> writes:
| >
| > | But if 3.1.2 was called 3.2, it would not be minor release but major, thus
| > | could introduce ABI incompatibilities.
| >
| > As I understand people are objecting to having 3.1.x not binrary
| > compatible with 3.2.y.
| 
| The problem is that people are soon going to use 3.1.x in production
| environments.  If we switch today to 3.1, we're stuck with it, since
| it will be binary incompatible to later versions.  But if a release
| [1] from the 3.1 branch happens that ensures binary compatibilty with
| later GCC versions - and this happens in the next few weeks, I expect
| that the communities can switch to that version.  This should solve at
| least the problems I have at SuSE.

Thanks for the clarifications.  So all that needs is to make an
exception to our earlier commitment that minor releases won't
introduce ABI incompatibility; or make an exception to our scheduled
development plan.  I don't have any strong opinion.  But if we were
not to follow our developement schedule (as proposed by Jakub) we
have better to be sure that nearly all ABI bugs are fixed in 3.2 (or
we will face the same problem later).  Given the time-frame I'm not
sure we have enought latitude to do that...

-- Gaby