GCC 2.96 series
-The facts : MPlayer's compile process needs the
---disable-gcc-checking to proceed upon detecting a GCC version
-of 2.96 (apparently it needs this option on egcs too. It's because we
-don't test MPlayer on egcs. Pardon us, but we rather develop MPlayer).
-If you know MPlayer, you should know that it has great speed. It
-achieves this by having overoptimized MMX/SSE/3DNow/etc codes, fastmemcpy, and
-lots of other features.
-
The background : there were/are the GCC 2.95 series. The best of them was 2.95.3 . Please note the style of the version numbering. This is how the GCC team numbers their compilers. The 2.95 series are good. @@ -27,8 +19,22 @@
The action : RedHat started to include a GCC version of 2.96 with their distributions. Note the version numbering. This should be the GCC team's versioning. They patched the CVS version of GCC (something between 2.95 and 3.0) -They patched it very deep, and used this version in the distrib, because 3.0 -wasn't out at time.
+They patched it very deep, and used this version in the distrib because 3.0 +wasn't out at time, and they wanted IA64 support ASAP (business reasons). +Oh, and GCC 2.95 miscompiles bash on the s390 architecture (there is +no RedHat distribution for s390..) . + +The facts : MPlayer's compile process needs the
+--disable-gcc-checking to proceed upon detecting a GCC version of
+2.96 (apparently it needs this option on egcs too. It's because we don't
+test MPlayer on egcs. Pardon us, but we rather develop MPlayer).
+If you know MPlayer, you should know that it has great speed. It
+achieves this by having overoptimized MMX/SSE/3DNow/etc codes, fastmemcpy, and
+lots of other features. MPlayer contained MMX/3DNow instructions in a
+syntax that all Linux compilers accept it... except RedHat's GCC (it's more
+standard compliant). It simply skips them. It doesn't give
+errors. It doesn't give warnings. But hey, it compiles bash on s390 and
+IA64.
The statements : most developers around the world begun having bad feelings about RedHat's GCC 2.96 , and told their RedHat users to @@ -67,6 +73,38 @@
Binary distribution of MPlayer
-I'm too moody now for this.
+Tons of users asked us about this. For example Debian users tend to say: Oh,
+I can apt-get install avifile, why should I compile MPlayer ?
+While this may sound reasonable, the problem lies a bit deeper than
+those-fuckin-MPlayer-developers-hate-gcc-2.96-and-RedHat-and-Debian.
+