Re: Question on BIGGEST_ALIGNMENT in GCC on NetBSD/m68k

[Finn Thain <fthain@linux-m68k.org>]

On Wed, 18 Jun 2025, Greg Ungerer wrote:

> 
> > It's not really necessary to enforce this on Coldfire. However, since 
> > buildroot builds completely from source, it wouldn't even be a problem 
> > to change the alignment there as well.
> 
> Yes, that is totally right in my experience. Certainly in my ColdFire 
> work it is pretty much always a build-everything approach via buildroot 
> or similar. I wouldn't think an ABI change would actually worry too many 
> ColdFire uses, they don't use distributions like debian on them. (I 
> would love to hear from anyone who does!).
> 

That may work for end-users with a vendor BSP. But upstream developers 
need to be able to swap components. In general, when debugging I often 
have to run old binaries to find out whether I'm dealing with a deeper 
regression or not. Also, there is the bisection problem. It's not just a 
couple of distros who get to pay for an ABI break. It's the entire 
ecosystem.