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

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 02:53:33AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:

> On 2021-11-16 at 14:54:32, Jeff King wrote:
> > On Tue, Nov 16, 2021 at 01:54:27PM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
> > 
> > > But IMO this whole thing of trying to make this work on every compiler
> > > etc. just isn't worth it.
> > > 
> > > Let's just start using C99 features, and if anyone's compiler breaks on
> > > something like CentOS 6 document that they'll need to tweak a flag
> > > somewhere. We already know that works for all the other C99 features we
> > > have, there seems to just be this one exception of the ancient GCC
> > > version in this particular case.
> > 
> > Yeah, I definitely agree with this sentiment.
> 
> Unfortunately, we cannot do this without some sort of patch because our
> CI will be broken.  I'm fine if we want to drop GCC 4.8, but we need to
> be explicit about that or we need to add flags to make it work.  We also
> need at least something to make Windows work.  Dscho will not be happy
> if we just leave it broken.

Yes, but I'm not at all worried about breaking our CI. That's just a
patch away from fixing. I'm much more worried about confused users
building from source, because helping them is more difficult to scale.

My thinking was that breaking older compilers was preferable to breaking
non-gnu ones, because at least old ones go away eventually. But your
other email makes me wonder if those non-GNU ones may already be
overriding CFLAGS.

Still, if we can come up with a solution that breaks neither (with some
light auto-detection or heuristics in the Makefile), that could be the
best of both worlds.

-Peff