On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 01:45:07PM +0200, Thomas Klausner wrote:
Here's where you prefer to ignore the reality.
By any reasonable measure GCC 4.1 is not obsolete and thus should be supported.
Well, I disagree. The last release of gcc-4.1 was in 2007. The last
release of gcc-4.2 was in 2008. For 4.3, it was 2011, so we could call
that semi-alive; I don't think they'll release any new versions of
that nor 4.4. I'm not sure if they make official announcements about
these decisions. I personally would call everything before 4.3
definitely unsupported by upstream, but my guess is that it's really
everything before 4.6, because only 4.6, 4.7 and the upcoming 4.8 are
listed on the official gcc webpage (center right, http://gcc.gnu.org/).
So by the usual measures, it is obsolete. That doesn't affect that the
fact that it's still in use.
I think this is missing the point, but FreeBSD is at 4.2.2, which is
the last GPL2 version of gcc. It won't update. OpenBSD is even
further behind. So supporting older compilers is not a luxury, it's a
necessity. Deal.