Subject: Re: [PATCH] merge-file: fix build warning with gcc 4.8.5

From: "brian m. carlson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2022 01:46:46 +0000

On 2022-07-30 at 00:19:49, Đoàn Trần Công Danh wrote:
> On 2022-07-29 15:53:53-0400, Jeff King <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > Tested on a debian jessie chroot using gcc-4.8 and 4.9. Though note that
> > you also need to manually specify -std=gnu99 to get it to work at all
> > with those compilers these days! So I kind of wonder if it's even worth
> > catering to their warnings automatically.
> 
> Well, config.mak.uname automatically adds -std=c99 for RHEL 7 and
> CentOS7. Can we add the same things for Debian? Or should we just
> remove both?

I don't think we can do that, since Debian kernels don't include a
distinguishing pattern like that[0].  Also, Debian jessie doesn't have a
full set of security support, unlike CentOS 7, and thus I would argue we
probably wouldn't want to support it anyway.

My guess is that Peff used jessie because he uses Debian and it's easier
for him to set up than CentOS 7, not because we should use it as an
intentional target.

Personally, although I don't use RHEL and company in either my personal
or professional life anymore, I think it's probably worth providing a
modicum of support to because they're very common, at least as long as
there are freely available clones with security support (e.g., CentOS
and Rocky Linux) that we can test against.

All that to say that I think we don't need to change config.mak.uname
and can rely on folks just setting -std=c99 if need be.

[0] Okay, there is a pattern, but it doesn't include a fixed string and
neither shell nor make are ideal for pattern matching on it.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA