On Saturday 03 November 2001 01:53 pm, Trond Eivind Glomsr?d wrote:
> Let's be more precise here - this isn't about gnerating bad
> code. The issues with "non-standard coding styles" are about 2.96RH
> (and 3.0, for that matter) rejecting non-standards compliant
> code. It's a lot stricter than earlier compilers.
I understand the need for high standard compliance, and have nothing against
it. What I am against is enforcing this compliance with the sword, so to
speak - completely bailing out instead of just issuing a warning. Perhaps
bailing out is a good idea for the author of the package, but it is terrible
for the poor fellow that has just barely learned the ropes of system
administration - now he cannot install half of the packages out there, and it
would be very far from truth to say that every package that has not 100%
standard-compilant source is useless.
And speaking about generating buggy code, up to this day, the advice we offer
to our customers is to stay away from anything compiled with gcc 2.96 as far
as MySQL is concerned, which unfortunately includes your MySQL binary. We've
had several of our customers report random crashes and table corruption on
binaries compiled with 2.96. All without exception solved their problems by
installing our standard binary, which is compiled with gcc 2.91.
So, needless to say, our level of confidence in 2.96 is very low. We never
know when it is going to generate some faulty code, and the simple solution
for us is to tell our users to either use our binary or downgrade the
compiler. "It never crashed from me" quality assurance simply does not cut it
when you deal with a mission-critical server handling a million queries per
hour. Something so critical as a compiler cannot really be called stable
until the maintainer of at least every major package confirms to you that it
works OK with it.
The binaries produced with gcc 2.95 and gcc 2.91 are good enough in terms of
speed, and they are stable. Whatever advantage comes from using 2.96 is
simply not worth the risk for us and for our users. And you can be sure that
you would have heard a lot more good words for Redhat 7.x series from us if
you held back your urge to be on the bleeding edge and at least compiled
MySQL with gcc 2.95.
I still do not understand why you could not make kcc the default compiler and
call gcc 2.96 bravesoulcc or something like that. Brave souls do not mind
beta testing but they get really ticked when you give them beta quality and
call it stable.
--
MySQL Development Team
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