[U-Boot] [PATCH] arm: Make gcc 6.0 or later a hard requirement now.

[Stephen Warren]

On 12/05/2017 03:32 AM, Dr. Philipp Tomsich wrote:
> 
>> On 4 Dec 2017, at 20:02, Stephen Warren <swarren at wwwdotorg.org> wrote:
>>
>> On 12/02/2017 06:12 PM, Tom Rini wrote:
>>> Move the warning to an error as we have been promising would happen in
>>> this release.
>>
>> Oh. This has broken my U-Boot build/test system. I guess it's entirely my fault for interpreting the "2018.01" warning as "you'll need to fix this in Jan 2018", not "you'll need to fix this as soon as development starts for 2018.01":-(
>>
>> Is there a reason for requiring such an extremely new gcc, as opposed to simply something not ancient?
> 
> GCC-6 matches the definition of “not ancient”.
> We’ve just gone to phase 3 on GCC-8 a few weeks back, so GCC-6 will be 2 years old in April.

I disagree here. LTS Ubuntu (as an example of one reasonable distro that 
one might use) is only released every 2 years, and multiple of them are 
fully supported in parallel (so older releases are also reasonable to 
use). A 2-year-old toolchain is just old enough that one single LTS 
distro release /might/ have picked it up (in this case, this hasn't 
happened yet). To me, "not ancient" means "not 5 years old or more", 
where "5" is somewhat arbitary and could easily be 5-10 say, but 
certainly not a very small number like 2.

FWIW, I managed to get my systems running using Linaro gcc-7.2.1 
2017.11. However, the process was annoying since the older internal 
U-Boot branches we still support don't support anything /newer/ than 
gcc-5 (even for releases only about 1.5 years old; U-Boot jumped forward 
on compilers extremely fast with little overlap in support), so I had to 
make my system use a different toolchain for different builds:-( At 
least I have the infrastructure in place for this for next time.