On Sun, Feb 11, 2018 at 11:53 AM, Linus Torvalds
<torvalds@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Well, it's still not a very *big* bump. With modern distros being at
> 7.3, and people testing pre-releases of gcc-8, something like gcc-4.5
> is still pretty darn ancient.
... it's worth noting that our _documentation_ may claim that gcc-3.2
is the minimum supported version, but Arnd pointed out that a few
months ago that apparently nothing older than 4.1 has actually worked
for a longish while, and gcc-4.3 was needed on several architectures.
So the _real_ jump in required gcc version would be from 4.1 (4.3 in
many cases) to 4.5, not from our documented "3.2 minimum".
Arnd claimed that some architectures needed even newer-than-4.3, but I
assume that's limited to things like RISC-V that simply don't have old
gcc support at all.
That was from a discussion about bug report that only happened with
gcc-4.4, and was because gcc-4.4 did insane things, so we were talking
about how it wasn't necessarily worth supporting.
So we really have had a lot of unrelated reasons why just saying
"gcc-4.5 or newer" would be a good thing.
Linus
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