> I think I may have struck a nerve. I'm not sure I understand what that's getting at. It's not a particularly "sensitive topic" to me or us in general, I would think. The fact that english is a second language for me may prevent me from interpreting this comment appropriately.
> The consensus is that 8.2 is very old and I should upgrade. > > As a software developer, I understand completely. > > As a lowly user, I never want to upgrade *anything* that is > working - ever. (You _never_ trade non-working for working, you > trade the old bugs for a new set of bugs. ;-> ) I can understand the desire to avoid needless upgrades. However, software packages undergo maintenance to fix bugs and the odd security issue, and also undergo further development to extend their functionality. Sometimes this means that the upstream developer or developer community decides that a particular new C++ feature would be useful to use or rely on for the package. This means that the required support in the compiler is increased. There's a plethora of "new-ish C++ variants", such as c++11, c++14, c++17 and c++20 (ref. the documentation of the -std= argument in the g++ man page on a 10.0 system), so there's plenty to choose from... Since we are not in the habit of upgrading the in-tree compiler along a maintenance release branch, the 8.x NetBSD releases are stuck with whatever compiler 8.0 shipped with all those years ago, and its support for any number of those newer varints may not be there at all or be deficient in some manner. To a bit less degree this applies to C as well, and certainly to rust, where it appears to be fairly common to insist on the latest and greatest compiler. For rust I struck this problem a relatively short while ago, where I found that the built-in LLVM shipped with rust now requires a newer C++ variant than what is supported by the C++ compiler 8.x. So while I can sympathise, the world keeps on turning, and sometimes the desire to keep updating packages means that it might trigger the need for an OS upgrade process (bringing in a new major version of gcc) as well. Best regards, - Håvard
