Plug-ins on Windows

[Richard Guenther]

On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Joern Rennecke <amylaar@spamcop.net> wrote:
> Quoting Richard Guenther <richard.guenther@gmail.com>:
>
>> Re-compiling the same plugin sources for different gcc versions is
>> not supported.  Of course you might be lucky for minor version
>> changes such as 4.5.3 to 4.5.4.
>
> I think that's putting it a bit too strong.  If the maintainer of a plugin
> cares about the plugin working for a new gcc version that comes out, it
> is up to that plugin maintainer to determine if any relevant interfaces
> have changed so that the plugin source needs changing to continue support,
> or if the plugin simply won't be portable to that gcc version.
>
> Once it has been determined that no relevant interface has changed for a
> plugin, re-compiling it for the new gcc version should work fine.
> (Well, strictly speaking, it would work or not work regardless of
>  people having found out about this before, but that's not a safe mode
>  to operate.)
>
> It's pretty much the same as for out-of-tree patches.  They may or may not
> work in a new version.  There's nothing wrong with applying an old patch
> to a newer gcc version, if you know what you are doing.

I was making this strong statement to warn people that all bugreports
like "plugin $foo stopped to compile on the 4.5 branch after rev. XYZ"
will be closed as invalid.  Thus, there is no ABI/API compatibility
guarantee for plugins at all.  I expect that most of the time you will
be lucky on a release branch though (but it's still not supported, in
the sense of the first sentence).

Richard.