[neomutt-devel] About C flavour (Was: Refactoring's cosmetics 💄)

[Guyzmo]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2017 at 12:45:07PM +0100, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> On 26-01-2017 12:12:30 +0100, Guyzmo wrote:
> > And what system+archicture would be running those users that would be
> > left over?
> 
> RHEL/CO/OL 5: gcc-4.1.2

This release was supported from 2007 to 2014. It's now only having
limited support as it's now in the end of production cycle in a couple
of months. Only few customers will get extended support up to 2020,
given a fee.

So there's no reason to support that.

> RHEL/CO/OL 6: gcc-4.4.2

This release is entering the phase 3 in may, providing only limited
support (like debian's oldstable).

> RHEL/CO/OL 7: gcc-4.8.3

I'm pretty sure you can get a more recent gcc on those, as gcc-4.8 is
one of the buggiest GCC release we've seen a while.

> I don't know much about Debian/Ubuntu, but it won't be revolutionary I
> guess.  Seems Precise uses gcc-4.6.3, Trusty gcc-4.8.2, Vivid gcc-4.9.2,
> Xenial gcc-5.3.0.

Debian oldstable has gcc-4.7.2, Debian stable has gcc-4.9.

The only ubuntu you say that's not supporting C11 is Precise, which
Long Term Support will be ending next April.

> Maybe worth to consider how the downstream distros would have to
> build/package neomutt.

To sum it up, all distributions running old GCC <4.9 won't be supported
anymore at some point this semester, so we can safely ignore those as
targets.

Then, the only system we should worry about is RHEL7, which is a current
version of redhat, weirdly running on an old and buggy GCC, but
hopefully there's a package to fix this:

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Developer_Toolset/4/html/4.0_Release_Notes/DTS4.0_Release.html

Meaning if we introduce C11 features in the source base, then we shall
add a note in the compilation instruction aimed at RHEL users.

Then again I'm not advocating to introduce C11 features just for the
hell of it, but I don't want to block ourselves from using useful
features from C11 just because we want to make neomutt compile on old
systems, with a bold statement in the devguide that says:

"no C11, period!".

Though, I agree that the RHEL7 is indeed an issue.

-- 
Guyzmo