Hello,

On Mon, 5 Jun 2017 10:06:30 -0700, Lucas De Marchi wrote:

quoted

As you know, I'm contributing to Buildroot, an embedded Linux build
system, that allows to build from scratch lightweight, configurable
Linux systems through cross-compilation.  

Yep, I think I even may have 1 or 2 patches to buildroot :)

Yes, I know you're aware what Buildroot is :-) It was more an
explanation for the rest of the readers of this mailing list.

quoted

Buildroot is widely used in enterprise contexts, where sometimes very
old Linux distributions are used on build servers. As an example, we
even have to look at the version of the 'tar' utility available on the
host, and build our own if it's too old, because some old RHEL distros
have a tar version that is bogus.

In order to make sure our users in this situation don't face problems,
we run test builds on old distros, and one of my automated build
machine has a Debian old enough to still be based on gcc 4.3.  

I don't want to personally maintain compatibility with that old
compiler. I'll apply this, but it may break again in future.  If
breakage is too often, then I'll ask for you to maintain those patches
as downstream patches, ok?

We generally try to avoid maintaining downstream patches. So when that
happens, we'll probably just add the requirements that gcc version XYZ
is needed. And ask unhappy people to come complain to upstream
developers :-)

Thanks!

Thomas Petazzoni
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering
http://free-electrons.com