Re: [PATCH v2 1/1] git-compat-util: add a test balloon for C99 support

On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 01:44:23AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

quoted

Do most compilers understand -std=gnu99? It seems like we're breaking
the out-of-the-box build for everything that isn't gcc or clang.

I'm pretty sure -Wall is GCC- and clang-specific, as is -Wl,-rpath, so I
think we've already crossed that bridge.  There are places in
config.mak.uname where they're specifically overridden for that reason.

That's a good point. I guess we don't really have good data on how many
people will be (newly) affected either way.

quoted

I understand that older versions of gcc (prior to 5.1.0, from my
digging) default to gnu89, and so they would be broken _without_ this.
So it is a tradeoff one way or the other. But somehow this seems
backwards to me. We should assume that modern compilers support C99 out
of the box, and put the burden on older ones to trigger C99 support in
whatever non-portable way they need.

We'll have to adjust the CI job that builds with GCC 4.8, but I can do
that.  I just am not eager to hear complaints from people that it
doesn't work out of the box, especially since CentOS 7 is going to hit
this case.

Nor am I. I wonder if there's a way we can make it work out of the box
everywhere. Using detect-compiler more widely would be one way to do
that, though that's a bigger change to the Makefile in general. I kind
of wonder if we could just assume in config.mak.uname that Linux will
always have a compiler that understands -std=gnu99.

-Peff