Hello,

I have a package which would like to build a gcc plugin. I should
however not make it build-depend on a particular gcc-4.[567]-plugin-dev
package as the default version changes over time. Could gcc-defaults
also provide a gcc-plugin-dev package?

Samuel

Samuel Thibault, le Mon 30 Jan 2012 11:17:42 +0100, a écrit :

Actually, thinking a bit more about it, I guess I actually have
to build my plugin several times, once for each supported gcc
version. So we'd need something similar to python, i.e. something
like gcc-all-plugin-dev, and a way to iterate over all supported gcc
versions.

Samuel

Is this really needed? many plugins need modifications for different GCC
versions, and it should be easy to add such a "loop" or make magic to build for
different versions. There are not (yet) that many plugins for GCC.

Matthias Klose, le Mon 30 Apr 2012 12:41:49 +0200, a écrit :

My comments were before our discussion about a dpkg trigger to rebuild
the plugins automatically.  I agree that we can't really blindly hope
that plugins can compile with newer versions.

Samuel

Hello!

I suppose that gcc-plugin-dev metapackage will be very useful.

For example, Linux kernel supports GCC at least 4.5 for it's GCC
plugin infrastructure (ref: Documentation/gcc-plugins.txt), while
oldest GCC version in Debian is 4.6.3. Further example explanation is
the one may configure it's own Linux kernel source package simply
specifying gcc-plugin-dev in Build-Depends, as it done for
gcc-multilib (build dependency for linux-perf).

Anyway, this package is mostly intended to use by developers, so I
dont' see any problem when something does not build at first time
(solving FTBFS is part of work).