Annvix Development Blog

There was some discussion on the dev@ mailing list about a week ago regarding the path for 2.0 that needs to be defined now. The things on the table were gcc 4.1 (we’re using 4.0.3) and glibc 2.4 (we’re using 2.3.6). Although implementing these may push the release for 2.0-RELEASE back a bit, the other alternative was to wait until the 3.0-CURRENT cycle to implement them as I’m not too keen on dropping glibc 2.4 on a .1 or .2 release.

Anyways, we decided we were going to hold off on glibc 2.4 until 3.0 and integrate gcc 4.1 now (primarily for SSP). One big reason for holding back glibc is that 2.4 essentially requires a 2.6 kernel… from my understanding, it will absolutely not work with a 2.4 kernel. So for those people who still want to use a 2.4 kernel (even if we are using 2.6 by default now), glibc 2.3 is staying for a while yet. The downside is that we have to build libssp as a separate library instead of having it a part of glibc itself, but that’s a tradeoff we’re willing to make.

So tonight I upgraded gcc to 4.1 just to see how much work I had ahead of me and it actually went quite smoothly. It looks to be compatible enough with stuff compiled with 4.0.3 which is fantastic… I upgraded it, installed libssp beside it, rebooted, and everything worked smoothly so I’m quite impressed with that… means we may not have to push things back further than I had thought (I like to allot myself a lot of time when it comes to gcc and glibc because they’re both voodoo as far as I’m concerned and I’ve wasted tonnes of time on them in the past).

I’ve left a message to the same effect on the dev@ mailing list and am waiting for a few opinions (and plan to do some more testing over the next day or two) before committing it and putting it officially into 2.0-CURRENT, but so far so good.