Re: Minimum compiler version (was: Re: [PATCH v5 0/4] Update gnulib and drop some patches)

[Daniel Kiper]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 12:24:50PM -0500, Robbie Harwood wrote:
> Glenn Washburn <development@efficientek.com> writes:
>
> > GCC 5.1.0 looks like it came out on April 22, 2015[1] and 5.2 was used
> > in Ubuntu Xenial from 2016 (which is no longer supported). At what
> > point do we bump up the minimum supported version? And doing so
> > wouldn't mean that GRUB can't be compiled with eariler versions of
> > GCC, it just means we don't test that. I also think it would be
> > acceptable to accept patches that fix issues with compiling on GCC
> > versions less than the stated minimum supported version (with in
> > reason and subject to discretion).
> >
> > One idea is to update the minimum supported version every release cycle
> > to the lowest GCC version that is about 5 years old (that's artitrary
> > but seems reasonable).

I think we should support a given minimum compiler version until it does
not require a lot of effort from our side. So, as long as possible...

> > I'm interested in this because it seems to imply that for the testing
> > system it should do two compilations for every target, one for the
> > munimum supported GCC and one for a somewhat recent version.

I fully agree with this.

> I support raising the minimum compiler version.
>
> Looking at https://www.gnu.org/software/gcc/releases.html , a five-year
> proposal would raise to gcc-7.

I am OK with this because as it was pointed out in other places older
compilers do not support RISC-V builds. Of course if I do not hear
a lot of complaints... :-)

So, I am looking forward for an INSTALL file patch...

Daniel