Re: Deprecate i386 for GCC 4.8?

[John Marino <gnugcc at marino dot st>]

On 12/13/2012 12:38, David Brown wrote:
> On 13/12/2012 12:24, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 13, 2012 at 11:43 AM, John Marino wrote:
> > > I don't speak for FreeBSD, but dropping them from Tier 1 support because
> > > they don't use a GPLv3 *BASE* compiler is a bit vindictive.
> >
> > FreeBSD has dropped GCC for future releases so there's no reason for
> > it to be a primary platform.
>
> Yes there is good reason for keeping bsd targets. FreeBSD and others may
> be moving to llvm, or using older gcc's, for their official binary
> builds - but /users/ are still free to pick whatever tools they want.
> They are also free to download the source of FreeBSD and compile it
> themselves with gcc 4.8 fresh from svn.

This is exactly right and what I attempted to say earlier.  Also, the 
FreeBSD ports collection contains entries for gcc 3.4, 4.2, 4.4, 4.6, 
4.7, and 4.8 (development) so the users would build from ports since gcc 
typically needs a few patches on *BSD.

> Dropping bsd as a target architecture just because the BSD distributions
> don't use it is a bit like dropping support for targeting windows just
> because Microsoft didn't use gcc to compile Windows 8.

It needs to be pointed out that while the base system can be built 
without gcc, literally thousands of ports require GCC to build.  It's 
still in widespread use.

John