Re: backward compatability of tools

[Roger Leigh]

Bruce Korb <address@hidden> writes:

> Eric Siegerman wrote:
> 
> > Hmmm, that brings up GCC.  I know they have their own reasons for
> > sticking with 2.13 (or had, last time I checked), but AC's
> > dropping old-box support might be one more, given that GCC is
> > seen as (among other things) a way to bootstrap the rest of GNU
> > onto weird systems.
> > 
> > If people don't think this is an appropriate line of reasoning,
> > I'll accept that, but it seemed worth mentioning.
> 
> Even GCC folks are starting to come to the realization that
> it's not worth the developer time to squander it on maintaining
> hobby boxes.  For the most part, GCC developers want good
> development tools and they don't find them on featureless
> ancient boxes.  Also, if you really want to know the GCC position,
> post it to the GCC steering committee folks.  :-)

Even in the case of GCC, why can't you build, say, 2.7.2, and then
bootstrap 2.95.x and then 3.2.x in succession?  As long as there's an
"upgrade path", there's no need for the current toolchain to be fully
backward-compatible with every system out there.

Really old systems probably won't survive a recent full GCC build ;-)


-- 
Roger Leigh

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