OSNews

Over the last two weeks, Debian developer Martin Michlmayr compiled the whole Debian archive on a quad-core MIPS machine donated by Broadcom using GCC 4.1. The aim was to find problems in GCC 4.1 itself and bugs in free software projects exhibited by GCC's increased standards conformance (in particular regarding C++ code). Read more for the details.

By compiling about 6200 packages, over 500 new bugs have been discovered and submitted, 280 of which are specific to the increased strictness of GCC 4.1. In a posting to the Debian development list, Martin classified the bugs he found and offered some useful links to programmers of C++ code. In a posting to the GCC list, he proposed that GCC should only produce new errors after warnings have been shown for at least one release, giving programmers more time to fix their code. This work is part of his research on quality in free software carried out at the University of Cambridge and sponsored by Google.