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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

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ori_b

> I disagree, for anybody who knows how FreeBSD works

That excludes the bulk of this site's readers.

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People are here obtusely misunderstanding more than just how FreeBSD works.

Imagine this:

"Microsoft has removed Notepad from Windows!"

"You dummy, no it hasn't; you can still get a Notepad for Windows from the Microsoft Store! Microsoft only removed it from the base installation of Windows, not from Windows as such."

Doh? If that happened, you would no longer be able to rely on any installation of Windows to have Notepad.

Perhaps, but then the distinction between the base system and ports will be lost on them too, and saying that it's merely been removed from the build system doesn't do this news justice IMO, it's more significant than that.

Maybe we could compromise with "FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system" or something similar.

> Maybe we could compromise with "FreeBSD has removed GCC from its base system" or something similar.

I think this would make the best headline.

> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize. (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Which would make the headline that is most in accordance with the guidelines here:

"remove GCC 4.2.1 build infrastructure"

The thing is that it is not significant news, except perhaps to FreeBSD base developers. It does not signify anything really, certainly not all of the things that people are reading into it even in this very discussion. It's not the death knell of GCC. It's not some sort of war. It has no impact on FreeBSD users, or on people building applications on FreeBSD. It's not even much of a change, considering that the actual concrete change, switching compilers, happened a while ago.

> The thing is that it is not significant news, except perhaps to FreeBSD base developers

I think it's significant news, and I have no connection to FreeBSD. It's a significant milestone for Clang, which makes it significant news to C programmers.

> It's not some sort of war.

Well, these compilers are competing with each other. It's a bit like the browser war, such as it is. If there were a respectable BSD-licensed browser, I'm sure the various FreeBSD-on-desktop distros would favour it.

> It's not even much of a change, considering that the actual concrete change, switching compilers, happened a while ago.

As a nail in the coffin moment I'd say it's still significant.

It’s a good time for the bulk of this site’s readers to learn something about the BSD philosophy then.

Edit: This comment was not meant to be snarky.

I'm a relatively new FreeBSD user, in fact I'm writing this on a Thinkpad running FreeBSD right now. The title is still super misleading, I had no clue that it was talking about the build infrastructure from the title alone - instead, I was expecting that my next version upgrade would remove GCC compatibility. Learning the FreeBSD philosophy doesn't change the fact that the title is inaccurate and unhelpful.

Yes, your next upgrade will remove GCC from the base system, not just from the "build infrastructure". However, you can still install the GCC port, as before.

With a tiny caveat: most folks actually won't feel this, because GCC hasn't been included in any x86 installed base system for quite a while now. Most exposure to it for many users would have been if they were cross-building archs that still required it, as the build infrastructure would bootstrap an appropriate GCC4.2 at that time.

I think you misunderstood what I was saying - I was expecting that this post would mean that GCC would stop working, or no longer be available, for me as a user. The point is that even for a FreeBSD user - albeit a new one - the title here is unclear on what "removed GCC" means.

But FreeBSD doesn’t control what software works on FreeBSD, that is up to the individual software maintainers. What you are describing would be “GCC has removed support for FreeBSD.”

Then you really need to read up handbook again. Removing things from base never meant what you think it meant.

You can't expect people to be experts in everything.

I didn’t expect people to be experts in everything, and my comment says the exact opposite: non-experts could learn a little bit about the subject.

I just learned something useful! There might be more crud in BSD, better avoid. The fact they only now remove gcc-4.2 as the base of their system has told me more than enough, thanks, but no thanks.

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