Small idea

[Mo McKinlay]

I just had a small idea which might be useful (although I'm not sure).

I noticed a lot of the ICE reports are for older versions of gcc (often
egcs releases from when egcs and gcc weren't the same). Perhaps if gcc
(when given the -v option) checked its release date and compared it to the
current date and time. If the difference was significant (12 months, say),
a message similar to this could be displayed:

Warning: This release of gcc is more than n months old. You might want to
consider upgrading to a newer version.

Obviously the release date would have to be #define'd somewhere in the
sources (as build dates would be largely useless for this) and updated
when a new release is made.

Displaying something like this might encourage people not to use old
versions of gcc, without being so obtrusive as to become annoying (if for
example you knew there wasn't a more recent version available for your
target). Obviously it doesn't solve anything now - but it might help 12
months down the line :-)

Good/bad/useless idea?

-- 
Mo McKinlay             Chief Software Architect              inter/open
mmckinlay@labs.interopen.org                    http://www.interopen.org