On Thu, Jul 1, 2010 at 3:23 PM, Joern Rennecke <amyl...@spamcop.net> wrote: > Quoting Richard Guenther <richard.guent...@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.
