On 2007-08-13 14:40:57 -0700, David Brodbeck wrote: > On Aug 13, 2007, at 11:31 AM, Vincent Lefevre wrote: >> There's a big difference: GCC is useless for the end user. And >> I don't think that old GCC versions are really necessary. > > They are if you need to compile old software. Some stuff just won't > build with newer GCC versions.
But 1. Such software is not from Debian. 2. Such software probably uses non-standard features, in which case this is not GCC's fault or the fault of the C language. FYI, GCC 4 still supports K&R (pre-standard) C constructs (-traditional and -traditional-cpp options) and trigraphs (-trigraphs option). 3. You do not need GCC at run time: you can install old GCC versions on some machine compile old software there, and use it on other machines, even those that don't have enough disk space for GCC. > Also, your end users are clearly different than mine. My users compile > stuff pretty frequently, often crusty old software used by some research > project or other. I also compile things frequently, even not recent software, but I have never had any problem with GCC 4.x (except bugs, of course, but they end up in being fixed, and every software has bugs anyway). -- Vincent Lefèvre <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/> 100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/> Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon) -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
