Recommended GCC version?

[David Herron]

David Holmes - Sun Microsystems wrote:
> Andrew,
>
> Andrew John Hughes said the following on 06/20/08 09:35:
>> I would hope one of the side effects of moving the JDK from a
>> proprietary to a community-based Free Software model would be that it
>> gets built, run and tested on a much wider range of platforms and
>> compilers.  This has already started to happen.
>
> Agreed - this is a good end goal. Meanwhile there are some 
> practicalities to address.
>
>> The reality is that people aren't going to download and build a
>> specific copy of GCC just for OpenJDK, and distros will certainly want
>> it to build with the GCC they use for everything else.
>
> But are the Distros expecting/assuming that everything will work fine 
> with their version of GCC? Who is expected to have done the testing? 
> If something goes wrong who would be expected to fix it? Would the 
> Distros patch the OpenJDK code with a workaround for their GCC 
> version? Or would they grab a known working GCC version and rebuild 
> using that?
>
> Right now the reality is that these alternate compiler versions have 
> not undergone extensive testing for the OpenJDK. Over time that will 
> hopefully change, but for now - caveat emptor!
>
> Cheers,
> David Holmes
>
Ubuntu ships with a default GCC but you can also install other GCC's

/usr/bin/gcc versus /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 versus /usr/bin/gcc-3.4 etc

It doesn't seem very onerous (on Ubuntu) for the end user to do this.  
I'd think other distros also do this.  I have no idea how onerous it is 
for the distros to provide this service.

-- David Herron