Re: Deprecate i386 for GCC 4.8?

[Gerald Pfeifer <gerald at pfeifer dot com>]

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, John Marino wrote:
> FreeBSD ports have every modern version of GCC in them, nothing stops a 
> user from building and using the latest GCC on FreeBSD (Note the ports 
> are well maintained).

Thanks, John. :-)  (Note to those not aware I am taking care of those.)

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Richard Biener wrote:
> Well, I'm fine with changing it to i486-freebsd - just keeping 
> i386-freebsd listed but deprecating i386 looks odd.

FreeBSD actually does not support i386 anymore either, this is just
a way of referring to 32-bit x86.  Cf. gcc/config/i386/freebsd.h

  /* Support for i386 has been removed from FreeBSD 6.0 onward.  */
  #if FBSD_MAJOR >= 6
  #define SUBTARGET32_DEFAULT_CPU "i486"
  #endif

So, making this change definitely should be fine. :-)

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> The "it's 386, nobody uses it" clause? I wouldn't mind if some other
> freebsd tripled would stay on the list, e.g. i686-freebsd.

Per the above, i486 would be totally straightforward -- famous last
words! -- and Loren reported i686 as working while still more active
on the GCC and FreeBSD sides.

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Richard Biener wrote:
> If we deprecate i386 it shouldn't stay as i386-freebsd though.

Yes, I can see how this would be confusing, even if (or rather: 
because?) that i386 actually is not really i386.  

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Steven Bosscher wrote:
> But for the build status lists, freebsd, or for that matter any other
> BSD variant, is missing from the latest maintained releases.
> 
> The last confirmed build is for GCC 4.4 on i386-unknown-freebsd7.2.
> That'd be in 2009...

For the record, the reason we don't have those is that people on
FreeBSD usually use the ports since, unlike most GNU/Linux distributions,
those also are easy to build from source and the ports have been moving
along GCC release branches, but rarely covering an actual GCC release
(rather a few days before or after the release, usually).


Looking at this thread overall, it occurs to me that nobody so far
has objected to just renaming i386-unknown-freebsd* to 
i?86-unknown-freebsd* (where ? could be a verbatim ? or a 4 or a 6)?

Gerald

PS. I'll be offline for three weeks now most likely.