Question: What is GCC 2.96 ? I can't find it at GNU site.

Answer: Read the official answer from GNU GCC team.

Question: What is the problem with GCC 2.96 ? And with 3.x ?

Answer:

And for the people, who periodically asks what are the exact problems with gcc 2.96, my answer: we don't know exactly. There were various problems and new problems / bugs come up periodically. It is not a single bug/problem. We just see various bugreports, mostly gcc internal bugs, compiler syntax errors in source or bad code compiled. They all are solved using different version of gcc. I understand that gcc 2.96 has different default optimization flags and they conflicts with our inline asm code, but we can't fix them, and we really don't want to fix them as they work with other compilers or gcc versions, and the fix may cause speed loss.

I think that the gcc 2.96 should be fixed to be option-compatible with other releases, but redhat guys refused to do it. If someone interested - ask Eugene K., avifile author, he has a long mailing with them, because they had the same problems with avifile. Finally he changed avifile source to workaround gcc 2.96 bugs... We simply has no interest and time to do it.

Ah, and about the pipe-in-comment bug: it wasn't really our bug. I've talked one of gcc maintainers, and he told me that gcc 2.96 and 3.x supports intel asm syntax, and it caused the pipe bug. But it was a bug, because gcc silently, without any warning, ignored the whole asm block. They have fixed that, now it prints warning and doesn't skip the block. (at least he told me, i didn't checked)

Other gcc 3.x problems comes from broken libstdc++ or glibc header (std_*.h) installation. They are not our fault. MPlayer compiles and works well with gcc 3.x versions. Only 2.96 is broken, but it depends on many environment elements, including gcc 2.96 release number, enabled mplayer features, etc. If it works for you using gcc 2.96, it doesn't mean it will work for everyone.

Question: No! You are wrong! Everything works with gcc 2.96 but MPlayer

Answer:

No. You are wrong! Several projects (mainly which source contains high optimized inline asm code) had problems with gcc 2.96. For example: avifile, MESA / DRI, Wine, ffmpeg. But other projects already workarounded gcc bugs (changed code which triggered compiler bugs) so they work for now.

Question: No! You are wrong! Everything works with gcc 2.96 including MPlayer

Answer:

Question: Ok. Understood. But I want to give it a try... how to compile with gcc 2.96?

Answer: Really? Are you sure? Ok. You know... here is it: ./configure --disable-gcc-checking

Question: No! I don't agree with you, because ...

Answer: It doesn't matter. Keep your commets for yourself. We're not interested in gcc 2.96 stories.