Lack of libstdc++ compatibility (was: Revision 176335)

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Tue, 2 Aug 2011, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
>> Revisions 176335 removed the traditional "#include <unistd.h>" from
>> gthr-posix.h. This breaks the build of many programs (Firefox, Chromium,
>> etc.) that implicitly rely on it. 
> This isn't the first time the libstdc++ headers were cleaned up, and 
> each time there are dozens of programs that need to be fixed up. Each 
> time they just were fixed.

I think that is a bit too much of a cavalier approach.

For example, right now I am in the process of changing the compiler
FreeBSD uses for Fortran packages from GCC 4.5 to 4.6 and 100% of
the issues we run into are not related to Fortran but...C++.

Breaking source code compatbility with a step like GCC 3 to GCC 4
is one thing, but constantly doing so with every release is just
painful and makes as look bad.  And it hinders the adoption of 
newer releases.

Gerald