GCC 3.3.1 Switch Coming Soon On NetBSD

Dan writes "Matthew Green says he is ready to switch sparc, sparc64, i386 & alpha ports to using GCC3.3.1 by default on NetBSD. He's uploaded 4 snapshots (one per port ;-), all cross compiled from i386-netbsd. However, there appears to be work involved with fixing approximately 193 broken packages, as reported by NetBSD's Jan Schaumann."

Comments

I didnt know gcc3.3 was that mature

[mnmn]

Until recently many packages required gcc2.x for compilation simply because 3.x has been relatively untested. Will this bring some kind of instability in NetBSD if say the compilation is successful but with tonnes of warning messages? Are gcc 2.x and 3.x really that different?

Re:I didnt know gcc3.3 was that mature

[__past__]

The biggest annoyance is that newer GCCs treat multiline string literals (i.e. strings with embeded newline characters as opposed to \n) as errors, instead of just issuing a warning. This is actually conforming behaviour, so packages should really be fixed upstream. Other than that, I never had any problems beyond simple warnings, but of course, YMMV.

Given that GCC got better and better in terms of ISO/ANSI C conformance, most problems are probably bugs that just didn't show up yet because they went with a matching GCC bug. So fixing them will only increase conformance, and hence portability to other compilers.

Re:It's dead, Jim

[BSD BullShitDefense]

I am fed up with the troll postings.

I am also very pissed that they aren't filtered out.

Lets fight that bullshit!

First I will examine how easy it is to script trollings into the BSD section, perhaps the Slashdot crew does a little bit of defense. But I doubt it somehow.As they don't communicate, I have to find it out myself.

Next thing is to develop a troll scanner to demonstrate how to detect that bullshit. My guess is that those are very easy to detect.

I am not sure what will be the step after that.

Some stupid ideas are:

• Harassing the Slashdot editors, by autofiling complaints, after easy bullshit detection until they include a filter in their software?
• Flooding the other sections in the hope that then the problem will get addressed?
• Creating a proxy that passes all content through except for identified trollings?
• Forwarding each BSD troll post to the linux kernel hacker list?

I don't know yet.It is not easy. Vigilantism is something I don't really want. On the other extreme doing nothing seems only to let the situation deteriorate further.

Or should one simply switch over to Daemon News? This section is cheap rip-off most of the time anyway.

Guess this bot will beg for up mods to do something positive with the karma (auto modding the trolls down?). The source should also kept in an open source repository under BSD license!

BSD BullShitDefense

Re:It's dead, Jim

[bsd_usr]

I think you mean one MORE BSD moving to 3.x, but yeah its' true what you say. There's really nothing all that exciting going on. But that can be said about the rest of the Open Source world. Nothing is all that exciting anymore. Not KDE, not GNOME, not Linux, etc. It's just the same old shit cooked up in a different way.

Hell, it's almost safe to say that there isn't much exciting going on in the rest of the computing world. Seems like things are moving kinda slow these days. I guess the only thing that I'm looking forward to these days as far as computing is the Athlon64 with a 64bit version of Windows. Why Windows? Because it's quite usable.

But, don't fear. I'll stil use FreeBSD for my servers. It's stable and easy to maintain. That's what I like most about it.

It breaks on VAX

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but some of us using VAX systems have discovered that GCC 3.3 DOES NOT WORK on our systems and nobody seems interested in fixing it.
see:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-vax/2003/09/

(remember to take the space out that slashcode puts in)