On Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 11:34 AM, Gerald Pfeifer <ger...@pfeifer.com> wrote: > On Tue, 2 Aug 2011, Jakub Jelinek wrote: >>> Revisions 176335 removed the traditional "#include <unistd.h>" from >>> gthr-posix.h. This breaks the build of many programs (Firefox, Chromium, >>> etc.) that implicitly rely on it. >> This isn't the first time the libstdc++ headers were cleaned up, and >> each time there are dozens of programs that need to be fixed up. Each >> time they just were fixed. > > I think that is a bit too much of a cavalier approach.
Because you ignore the fact that this change fixed a bug. > For example, right now I am in the process of changing the compiler > FreeBSD uses for Fortran packages from GCC 4.5 to 4.6 and 100% of > the issues we run into are not related to Fortran but...C++. > > Breaking source code compatbility with a step like GCC 3 to GCC 4 > is one thing, but constantly doing so with every release is just > painful and makes as look bad. And it hinders the adoption of > newer releases. Such visible changes are less of an issue when adopting a new release compared to hidden issues that only show up during testing. Richard. > Gerald >
