Re: HEADS UP: No gcc by default in -HEAD on platforms where clang is cc

On Fri, 2013-09-06 at 21:19:32 +0100, David Chisnall wrote:
> Hi Everyone,
> 
> As of r255321, we are no longer building gcc or libstdc++ as part of the default install on platforms where clang is cc.
> 
> If you are using gcc, you have two options:
> 
> 1) Install one of the lang/gcc* ports (Warner has been working on separating out the patches to our GCC, so these should soon be patched to provide the same features as the one in base)
> 
> 2) Put WITH_GCC=yes and WITH_GNUCXX=yes in your src.conf when you build world.
> 
> GCC will stay in the base system tree for at least the lifetime of the 10.x release, and possibly longer if it is still being actively used.  It will remain used by tinderboxes and make universe for some architectures, so if you commit code without testing with gcc people will know very soon...
> 
> Thanks to Warner for all of his recent work on disentangling the toolchain, to all of the people (Roman, Dimitry, Brooks, and others) who worked on getting clang integrated into FreeBSD and to everyone who tested it and filed bug reports.  As of today, PowerPC64 joins x86 and ARM as platforms where world+kernel can be successfully built (and work) with clang (although it isn't the default yet and needs more testing), and hopefully other architectures will follow soon.
> 
> Huge thanks to all of the ports people who have spent the last two weeks working on dealing with the fallout from iconv and ensuring that all of the ports work with clang and libc++.  I think over the last week, the number of failing / ignored ports has dropped by about a thousand a day on the no-gcc test box that Bapt has been running, which is a phenomenal achievement.  

Indeed, thanks to all for their hard work, this is good news overall!

To nitpick, however, what has been fixed is that ports "build" with
clang and libc++, no effort can humanely be done to make sure they
really *work* as before.

Case in point, I only recently switched to clang in base and now the
newsbeuter port crashes during startup (yeah, it builds fine). So all
I'm asking for now is: how can I override a random port to be built with
gcc (either from base or ports, I don't care). And what special
considerations need to be done when the port uses C++.

Cheers,
Uli