Re: GCC withdraw

On Sep 1, 2013, at 12:03 PM, Mark Linimon wrote:

> On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 10:41:18AM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
>> So my take away from this is that you have no plans to support any platform
>> that doesn't support clang as you just expect ia64 and sparc64 to die and
>> not be present in 11.0.  That may be the best path, but I've certainly not
>> seen that goal discussed publically.
> 
> If this is the case, IMHO:
> 
> - it's a decision to be made by the project as a whole, not just one
>   individual;
> 
> - if the decision is made, there should be one major release cycle
>   before it's done;
> 
> - our userbase (admittedly small) should have a heads-up that they
>   will have to migrate after that timeframe.
> 
> fwiw, unlike alpha, which was withdrawn because it had ceased to function,
> sparc64 and ia64 work and have active developer(s), so I don't think it
> would be entirely fair to cite its removal as a precedent.
> 
> tl;dr: just because you don't use these boxes doesn't mean others don't.

I'm working on a set of ports that can be installed so you can use the external toolchain support in the tree...  But it is being a pain since there turns out to be some unexpected interdependencies and ordering that's tricky to get right.

But this does mean I've extracted the FreeBSD specific changes into a series of patches...

Warner