# Firefox package requires GCC 4.6?



## zbang (Jan 11, 2014)

Hello,

Perhaps I'm being dense, which has been happening a lot recently, but why would a -package- require an updated gcc, or gcc at all? In this case, the firefox 23.0 package wants gcc 4.6.4, (4.6.3 was installed by the 9.2 installer). I don't have a super-fast net connection (1 Mbit/s down) or system, so I'm trying to use only the 9.2-release packages ( from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/relea ... /packages/) and download/build as little as possible.

_Th_anks,

z!


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## ljboiler (Jan 11, 2014)

Perhaps there was some bug in the gcc runtime libraries (needed when _running_ an application) what was not fixed until version 4.6.4?


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## ikbendeman (Jan 13, 2014)

I'm on 10-RC5 and I edited my bsd.gcc.mk to default to gcc48 so that ports that use autoconf don't have issues like they did when I edited my make.conf. Everything both built and ran fine, I didn't even libmap.conf. Though that could be the reason I cannot get multimedia/plexmediaserver to work properly and emulators/virtualbox-ose gives me a segfault (core dumped) error. I'm afraid to use libmap because 99% of my ports compiled with clang just fine . So nice to be able to use all the new instruction sets on my shiny new AMD-FX 8 core... even XOR!


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## zbang (Jan 15, 2014)

ljboiler said:
			
		

> Perhaps there was some bug in the gcc runtime libraries (needed when _running_ an application) what was not fixed until version 4.6.4?



That's a good argument for updating the libraries, but that should also be a separate package. I can't think of a case where a package would need a compiler in order to install. (Having said that, there probably is such a case.)


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## SirDice (Jan 16, 2014)

If you build something with GCC46 (or any other version for that matter) the resulting binary is going to depend on some of the libraries from GCC. That's the reason why the package depends on GCC. Not for the compiler but for the libraries that come with it.


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