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

[Jonathan Wakely]

On 18 August 2011 10:34, Gerald Pfeifer wrote:
> 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.

Personally I *like* it when a new release identifies portability
problems such as missing includes.  I consider it an advantage, and an
improvement in the compiler.