[141132] trunk/dports/lang/apple-gcc42/Portfile

[Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia]

> On Oct 14, 2015, at 09:21, Landon J Fuller <landonf at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> On Oct 13, 2015, at 9:16 PM, Jeremy Huddleston Sequoia <jeremyhu at macports.org> wrote:
>>> If anything, I think MacPorts ought to be shielding users from Apple’s use of tooling updates to bitrot working software that happens to not be aligned with their release-to-release platform priorities.
>> 
>> The best way to "shield users" is to fix or remove broken and unmaintained ports.
> 
> Unlike post-iOS7 Apple, I don’t think platform vendors serve their users by capriciously breaking working software.

I take great personal offense to that statement.  Apple engineers (myself included) take great strides to make sure that existing software continues to work.  Binary compatibility is a top concern at Apple, and if you find any case where existing software breaks after an OS update, make sure you report it.

> If the apple-gcc42 port — or any other — works, then I see no reason to forbid developers from using it.

The port works in that the resulting software does what it was designed to do.  The problem is that it was designed almost a decade ago.  It is an antiquated toolchain that is riddled with bugs, won't ever be fixed, and doesn't support modern language revisions.

> If, in the future, it ceases to work, I see no reason to forbid interested parties from fixing it.

There have been no such interested parties; I was the one that resurrected it and improved it to allow it to be a usable fallback compiler while ports got fixed to support clang or clang got fixed to deal with broken corner cases exposed by ports.  That usefulness is now dried up.  If someone does become interested, I would be happy to let them take over, but it would probably be more worthwhile to update the gcc6 port with support for the apple gcc driver driver instead of meddling with a nearly decade old compiler.

--Jeremy


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