Re: gcc 5 & 6 & others already out of date?

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2022 at 05:26:04PM +0100, Mark Brown wrote:
> Note that I'm not saying we shouldn't upgrade our requirements at all,
> just that I'm worrying about going from one extreme to the other in
> terms of version requirements - it feels like there's a step change when
> you move from things you can get in current release distros people are
> likely to be using to things that will require a large proportion of
> people to install extra stuff.  At the minute we're more at the other
> end where it can be hard to figure out who'd even have the oldest
> versions we support without deliberately seeking them out and keeping
> them going is noticably making work for people.

Regarding "one extreme to the other", I suspect that in spite of my
arguments, which would seem to justify an extreme, the actual thing I
suggested is a bit more moderate: let's support the latest 2 or 3 gccs
at the time of kernel release. If we choose 3, that's roughly 3 years of
gccs, right? 3 years seems like a fairly long amount of time.

Jason