gcc compilation broken with SVN r264042

[David Chisnall]

On 2 Apr 2014, at 21:21, Steve Kargl <sgk at troutmask.apl.washington.edu> wrote:

> Who is "we" in "even if we don't encourage it..."?  

"We" is the FreeBSD project, collectively.  For a larger list of things that "we" recommend, look at the src.conf man page, which contains a long list of things that we encourage, codified as the defaults for a build.  Building FreeBSD-HEAD/i386 with gcc is just one of a long list of things that we don't encourage.  

> In fact, this is a fairly dumb idea,

Having a recommended compiler is a dumb idea?

> and *we* should encourage building
> the base system with as many different compilers as possible.

I didn't say otherwise, which is why I'm working to fix this.  I'd love to have the Jenkins jobs set up with external toolchain support and be able to plug in compilers from ports to try to build / boot / test the base system on a regular basis.

If you're developing FreeBSD or testing, then please compile with as many other compilers as you have and contribute patches (or even just detailed reports) if they find bugs in the code.

If, however, you want to run FreeBSD in production... well, there's a reason for those defaults.  Building the base system with a compiler that can't build the C++ stack that ports expects for FreeBSD 10 or 11 on i386, for example, is going to make your life exciting...

> It's called portability and allows one to find bugs that the
> annointed compiler might miss or actually cause. 

And, more importantly, it helps determine whether bugs are bugs in the compiler or in the code that they're compiling.  Being able to say that a bug goes away with one compiler gives you a good hint that it's a compiler bug.  Or something in the source code that relies on undefined behaviour...

But all of that is irrelevant to this bug report, so perhaps we can end this digression.  Unless, of course, you can reproduce this failure and would like to help fix it, in which case I'd be very grateful for your assistance.

David