Re: Clang as default compiler November 4th

On Mon, Sep 10, 2012 at 10:54:04PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
> As of last week, 4,680 ports out of 23,857 failed to build with clang on
> 9-amd64. That's almost a 20% failure rate. Until we have better support
> for either building ports with clang, or have better support for the
> idea of a "ports compiler," this change is premature. The ports are an
> important part of the FreeBSD Operating _System_, and pulling the
> trigger on the default compiler before the ports problems are addressed
> robustly seems like a big fat FU.
> 
> That said, I agree that this issue needs to be addressed. In fact, 9
> months before the release of 9.0 I said on the internal committers list
> that there was no point in making a new release until we had thoroughly
> addressed both the default compiler for the base, and resolving the
> "ports compiler" issue. While there has been some movement on the
> former, there has been nothing done on the latter for years now, even
> though everyone agrees that it is an important issue.
> 
> I'd like to request that rather than moving the default compiler
> prematurely that you call for volunteers to address the problems with
> the ports. Both the issues of fixing more ports to build correctly with
> clang, and the issue of defining a "ports compiler" version of gcc (and
> appropriate infrastructure) for those that can't. Once those issues are
> resolved there would not be any further obstacles to moving the default.
> Until they are, the change is premature.
> 
> Doug

Doug, as you can already use CLANG instead of GCC now, you will be able
to use GCC instead of CLANG after November 4th.

At the moment the ports maintainers don't give much about if their ports
build with CLANG or not because they're not forced to.
Those who don't run CURRENT won't notice, but those who do will have to
get their butts up and fix the ports, so 10.0 can have 99% of all ports
build with CLANG and even 8.x and 9.x can already profit from having the
broken ports fixed now.