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

[Uoti Urpala]

On Mon, 2006-07-10 at 14:18 +0200, Reimar Doeffinger wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2006 at 02:36:21PM +0300, Uoti Urpala wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The catastrophic failure is a developer wasting lots of time for
> something that in the end is a compiler bug (or at least related to the
> compiler, like strict aliasing problems). But actually the main point

If there's a problem on a newer gcc version someone has to find out the
cause anyway. You can't just try gcc-2.95 and say it must be a compiler
problem in new gcc if it happened to work with 2.95.

> maybe is, we have supported it so far and I simply don't see any need to
> drop support. So far I also haven't seen anyone complain that supporting
> it takes too much time or missed any of the new features. So it very

But several people have committed changes which gcc-2.95 fails to
compile. If that is OK with you then fine; but if you think people
should be more careful and avoid breaking 2.95 compatibility then I do
object to that. I think most developers have also taken 2.95 support for
granted and not considered what benefits use of new features might have
(I haven't really evaluated that myself for the more complex features).

> much feels to me like a "let's drop support just for the sake of dropping
> support".

I could turn that around and say your viewpoint sounds like "keeping
support because we've kept support before". If you want to tell me to
rewrite code I would naturally write in a way that gcc-2.95 fails to
compile and do extra checks for that before committing then I think
there should be a better reason than "no reason not to do it".