> On Apr 18, 2016, at 2:08 PM, Michael Catanzaro <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mon, 2016-04-18 at 22:36 +0300, Konstantin Tokarev wrote: >> Are there any objections for lowering GCC requirement from 4.9.0 to >> 4.8.4 (only for JavaScriptCore without B3)? I'm going to fix arising >> compilation errors myself. > > I've been kinda hoping to do this regardless, since you started > contributing GCC 4.8 buildfixes. GCC 4.8 is still being used by a > prominent distributor that's recently started releasing occasional > WebKit updates. I worked on downstream patches to remove the GCC 4.9 > requirement so that their users can get WebKit updates. Since > increasing our GCC requirement past the GCC version included in a > distribution just guarantees users will never receive WebKit security > updates, we need to recognize that we moved too quickly in increasing > our requirement to GCC 4.9. (At the time I thought this was OK, but I > was wrong.) We'll need to be more careful in the future when bumping > our GCC requirement, lest we leave a large segment of users stuck on > ancient versions of WebKit.
GCC 4.8 is three years old. I don’t think we should put a three year hold on all current and future C++ language features. Vendors that want to ship security updates to old, stable OS’s should maintain a branch that cherry-picks fixes from trunk and applies build fixes as necessary, rather than holding back development in trunk. > It's unfortunate as of course we want to be able to use new language > features, but we need to balance this with the desire to ensure our > updates reach users. I don’t think that shipping trunk as a security update on very old platforms is a viable strategy. Geoff _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo/webkit-dev
