On Thu, Oct 6, 2016 at 10:10 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote: [...]
And in practice this almost certainly doesn't matter -- the only reason people jump through hoops to get gcc 4.8 is for its improved C++ support. I just tried my c99 test file on CentOS 5's default gcc 4.1 and it was fine. And since RHEL 5 is going EOL in March 2017, for 3.6 purposes we only care about RHEL 6+, which ships with gcc 4.4, which is even less of a worry.
tl;dr: for purposes of 3.6 on linux, "CPython has to build on gcc 4.4" should be a fine rule that works for everyone. But I guess we probably also want a CentOS 5+gcc 4.1 buildbot for testing 3.5 point releases.
Doh, I have an off-by-one error, and wrote 3.5/3.6 where I meant 3.6/3.7. If the change is on the table for 3.6, then I guess I'd suggest continuing to support gcc 4.1 through the 3.6 support lifecycle, since I believe CentOS/RHEL 5 are considered supported platforms for 3.6, and the burden of doing this is probably very small. In particular, it doesn't seem to block any C99 features that we care about. (Is the list of supported platforms for Linux documented anywhere? PEP 11 documents the rule for Windows, and I'm assuming that the same rule applies to RHEL.) -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org