[squid-dev] More woes with ubuntu-precise

[Alex Rousskov]

On 08/18/2015 02:11 AM, Amos Jeffries wrote:

> The admin "need" that keeps being put forward is stability. With the
> meaning of "non-changing.". As in; nobody touches the Squid code from
> now until 2020 or so.

Personally, I have not heard anything like that from any admin. The
requirements I have heard are more along the lines of "being able to
build the latest Squid release on a still-supported LTS" or "being able
to build trunk on the latest LTS". I am not saying we should necessarily
satisfy these requirements. I am only saying that they seem a lot more
"reasonable" to me than what you said is "being put forward".


> We are increasing it for several reasons;
> 
> One of which is that the world has already moved on to GCC and Clang
> versions where C++11 is the default and actually C++14 the preferred
> language now.

This is one of those convenient (for developers!) vague "reasons" that
does not define any real boundaries or commitments. As in "we require
whatever we feel is reasonable". I am not saying we must have a policy.
Just that we should not pretend that we have it, when our version
selection decision is based on the ever-present "the world has moved
on", "code safety", and "code simplification" reasons.

Instead, whenever somebody asks what GCC version will be required to
build 4.0, we can just tell them to look it up on the wiki page, but
warn them not to expect the answer to be the same tomorrow [until 4.0 is
actually released].


> NP: That loosely includes Ubuntu and RHEL 7 whose current LTS supply
> GCC-4.8 by default and better versions via "unofficial" packages.

Current Ubuntu LTS releases include 12.04 which ships GCC v4.6 by
default AFAIK: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases


To summarize, for v4.0, do we require GCC v4.8 or do we require GCC
v4.9? Or is it more like "we require whatever it takes to compile at the
time of the first official release"? Our RoadMap wiki page says 4.9 but
4.8 crops up very often in this thread as being also supported,
confusing things.


Thank you,

Alex.