[MPlayer-dev-eng] [PATCH] Drop support for gcc-2.95

[Uoti Urpala]

On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 12:40 +0200, Reimar Doeffinger wrote:
> Well, the question is, which compilers do we support then? gcc 3.0-3.3 can't
> be supported, they simply have too many bugs.
> gcc 4.0 seemed to have some problems, too.
> So that leaves gcc 4.1 and 3.4, with 4.1 hardly being well
> tested, and AFAIK 3.4 still having the ocassional "can't find
> register..." problem with asm code.

Which compilers do people actually use? I think few use gcc 2.95, as I
mentioned in the first mail of the thread support for it has already
been broken for 3 weeks with the first public complaint now coming from
Rich.

> So my view is that
> 1) the cost for supporting 2.95 is really low (essentially building the
> code with it from time to time and maybe 20 minutes to fix the problems)

If that's the only thing done to support it the cost isn't too high, but
that'd also mean svn would probably not compile with 2.95 most of the
time, so it's questionable what degree of "support" that would give.
Would that essentially mean supported for releases only? Also some C99
features which would be useful but haven't been "accidentally" used so
far would not be so easy to work around for 2.95.

> 2) I don't see an alternative compiler that (except for those
> declarations) will compile MPlayer as reliably. IOW 2.95 is not obsolete
> since it misses a suitable successor (for now the 4.1 series makes a
> very good impression though).

I don't see the problem here. It's not like people need to compile their
video player with the most proven tools to avoid possible catastrophic
failure. Later gcc versions work well in practice, and nowadays current
versions of MPlayer are much better tested in combination with them too.
2.95 only works at all acceptably on x86-32 anyway.