On 07/31/2014 07:03 PM, Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 4:52 AM, NightStrike <nightstr...@gmail.com> wrote:
One thing you might want to consider is that with the typical X.Y.Z
versioning of most GNU projects, changing X allows breaking
compatibility in a significant way with previous versions. While Z
fixes regressions and Y adds new features, X is a place to make
infrequent but paradigm shifting changes that are unconstrained by a
desire to stay backwards compatible with older values of X.
By going to what is essentially a Y.Z.0 release mechanism, you lose
that ability to some degree. Maybe that's ok in a mature project like
GCC.
I believe the GCC project has become too large to be able to usefully
speak about breaking compatibility with previous versions. There are
too many different moving parts. We break compatibility in various
minor ways with every release. We try pretty hard to never break
compatibility in a big way. Historically, as far as I can recall, the
GCC major release number has never indicated a compatibility break
that was relevant to most users.
Ian
What about bumping the default compiler front end versions to C11 or
C++11 or C++14? Even for bootstrap?
There may be some breaking changes that are larger than the usual.
FWIW, I do not object to going to 5.0, 6.0.
Ed
