[haiku] Re: Haiku gcc2hybrid and software for gcc4

  • From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
  • To: haiku@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:20:02 +0100

On 2009-11-05 at 23:42:40 [+0100], Jorge G. Mare <koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-11-05 at 21:38 +0100, PulkoMandy wrote:
> > > Because that will become "inconsistent" as soon as gcc4 becomes the
> > > official
> > > choice, after R1. It would be better, in my view, to have gcc4 go to lib
> > > and
> > > gcc2 go to lib/gcc2.

That just swaps the problem without solving it. A consistent solution would 
be to always put libraries into gcc2 and gcc4 subdirectories regardless of 
whether they match the main ABI of a hybrid. This in turn will complicate 
things for porters, though.

> > This would break anything packaged for old BeOS...

It wouldn't. The libraries would be misplaced, but since there's no gcc 4 
version competing with it and shared objects using these libraries would have 
been built with gcc 2 anyway, that doesn't matter. The runtime loader would 
pick them up, since for the non-main ABI it falls back to the main ABI 
library search paths, when it couldn't find anything in the search paths for 
the matching ABI.

> I can't help but think that this whole business of GCC2 backwards
> compatibility is making the already thinly spread developer base bend
> over backwards too much.
>
> Is it really worth the effort to support closed-source, unmaintained
> binaries that are nothing but a dead end in the long run?

So far maintaining gcc 2 binary compatibility support hasn't been that big a 
task. When the costs increase significantly, we'll certainly drop it.

CU, Ingo

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