Recommended GCC version?

[Jonathan Gibbons]

It makes me wonder whether there should be a .deb/.rpm for *building*  
OpenJDK that causes all the right versions of all the necessary  
software to be installed.

-- Jon

On Jun 19, 2008, at 5:41 PM, David Herron wrote:

> 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
>
>