[OpenWrt-Devel] [PATCH] build: make GCC version 6+ minimal host build requirement

[Petr Štetiar]

Yousong Zhou <yszhou4tech at gmail.com> [2019-11-12 16:26:14]:

Hi,

> Not quite sure how much benefit enforcing -Wextra can bring to the
> whole code base.

I'm adding -Wextra for some time already to any C project I touch, nobody has
objected against it so far. I'm adding it because I think, that the latest
compilers are producing usable warnings, less false positives and that it
should be one of the standard hardening options for any network facing
project. I see -Wextra just as another pair of review eyes for me, even if
it's provided by the machine.

It's just older GCC versions making -Wextra PITA, so if we decide to keep
support for gcc-4.8+, then it would probably make sense to enable -Wextra for
gcc6+.

> Excluding support for vanilla CentOS7 will certainly cause inconvenience for
> large numbers of users. 

Well, I don't see anything bad about sunsetting of old tools. This is master,
so next OpenWrt release somewhere in the 2020, so probably not a big deal,
right? They're going to install python3 anyway as well.

> That is probably more so to serious industrial users.

If I'm able to install gcc-4.8 on my latest stable Debian, then I assume, that
it should be relatively straight forward to install some decent GCC version on
<your-stable-distro> as well.

If we decide to keep gcc-4.8 support, wouldn't it make sense to use gcc-4.8 on
buildbots as well? You know, in order to catch similar issues during QA
process.

I can certainly add gcc-4.8, gcc-4.9, gcc-5 to the CI compiler mix (currently
has gcc-7, gcc-8, gcc-9 and clang-9 compilers), but this is going to result in
the 6 additional compile/run tests (3 * release/debug), so it makes me wonder
if it's really worth the resources/efforts.

-- ynezz

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