Bumping minimum GCC from 5.x to 6.x?

[Andrew Hughes]

On 15:17 Mon 30 Aug     , Magnus Ihse Bursie wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> There is an open request[1] to bump the minimum GCC version from 5 to 6. 
> We've traditionally been very conservative with supporting old GCC 
> versions, but GCC 6 was released in 2016 (compared to GCC 5 in 2015), 
> and I think this sounds conservative enough.
> 
> Would it create a lot of problems for anyone if we raised the minimum 
> version?
> 
> /Magnus
> 
> [1] https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8256977
> 

Is this just for HEAD (i.e. OpenJDK 18 on)?  I don't think it's
appropriate to change the requirements for older released versions.

I think what compilers are supported tends to be determined less by
dictat and more by need.  If there are active maintainers building
with GCC < 6, then they will report build failures and (ideally)
fixes.  If no-one is actively building on a particular setup, it will
often start to fail without any realising, through no real fault of
anyone making changes.

For example, we had a recent change in 8u that broke older systems (a
C library rather than compiler issue in this case), and this was
resolved by people reporting the failure. It wasn't obvious in a code
review of the original patch, as it was to do with a macro being
undefined in certain circumstances, so I can't see that it would have
been caught unless someone was actively maintaining builds on those
older platforms.

Thanks,
-- 
Andrew :)
Pronouns: he / him or they / them
Senior Free Java Software Engineer
OpenJDK Package Owner
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

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