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Re: SunOS ports (M68k and sparc)
Jones Desougi <jones@ingate.com> writes:
> On Wed, 15 Oct 2003 18:04:55 -0700, Mike Stump wrote:
>> Feel free to do up your paper work, and submit the changes to make it
>> work. We probably won't be interested in using out-dated C compilers,
>> so, you will need a gcc binary to start with.
>>
>> After you do the paper work, and contribute the work... they just
>> work, right?
>
> This gets a whole lot more messy if the existing pieces are removed in
> the meantime. That is why I asked it be taken off the obsoleted list.
I am afraid it's already gone from the mainline.
The targets we have been obsoleting are very old, and by virtue of
their age they cause significant extra work for GCC maintainers.
SunOS 4 is one of the targets whose runtime library predates the 1990
C standard. These targets require us to maintain an extensive body of
code just to work around the bugs in their header files. SunOS also
has the dubious distinction of having special case code in GCC to work
around bugs in its kernel -- this would not be an issue if you wanted
to support it solely as a cross-compile target, of course.
I do not think we should restore SunOS -- or any other obsoleted
target -- just because someone offers to maintain the port. Having
someone maintain the port doesn't magically free all the rest of us
from the burden of keeping that port up to date with changes made to
target-independent code. I think we should only restore such targets
if compelling reasons are presented why the entire GCC community
should bear the additional burden of supporting these old systems.
I am not absolutely ruling out the possibility of restoring SunOS 4
(I don't have the authority even if I wanted to). However, Jones, I
would like to hear your reasons for wanting this, and especially your
reasons why you cannot continue to use older versions of GCC (which
may well work better than the current version, since none of us have
been designing with it in mind for years).
zw