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

[Heinrich Schuchardt]

On 2/26/22 02:50, Glenn Washburn wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Feb 2022 18:17:51 +0100
> Daniel Kiper <dkiper@net-space.pl> wrote:
> > The GRUB INSTALL file says:
> >
> >    The Requirements
> >    ================
> >
> >    GRUB depends on some software packages installed into your system. If
> >    you don't have any of them, please obtain and install them before
> >    configuring the GRUB.
> >
> >    * GCC 5.1.0 or later
> >
> > So, even if it is old it is perfectly valid compiler according to the
> > GRUB docs.
> >
> > Hmmm... What are the latest gnulib minimal compiler, linker, etc. requirements?
>
> In working on the testing system, I noticed that kernel.org provides no
> RISC cross compilers for x86_64 for GCC version < 7.3. I'm not sure if
> that's because there isn't support in earlier versions. The other
> recommended pre-built cross toolchain site toolchains.bootlin.com only
> has prebuilts for somewhat recent GCC versions (9.3 is the earliest for
> risc32/64). So the documentation above may be misleading for RISC.

RISC-V support was first introduced in GCC 7:
https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-7/changes.html

Best regards

Heinrich

> I like the idea of really old GCC versions be supported if its not a
> burden, but are we actually testing that GRUB does compile with 5.1.0
> (at a minimum even for releases)? I think the minimum supported version
> of GCC should be a version that is actually tested with.
>
> 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'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.
>
> Glenn
>
> [1] https://gcc.gnu.org/releases.html
>
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