On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 at 22:13, Tianon Gravi <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 at 10:59, Dr. Tobias Quathamer <[email protected]> wrote: > > So, if you don't have any objections, I plan to switch the default > > golang compiler to 1.26 in the next few days. > > It's a tiny bit tangential, so apologies for that, but I think it > would probably be prudent to finally do something about gccgo too, > while we're opening the hood on src:golang-defaults. > > For a long time now, gccgo has been stuck at an implementation of Go > 1.18, but even then, it's only a *partial* implementation of 1.18 > (notably missing generics). > > As noted and discussed in the CC'd https://bugs.debian.org/961916, > bin:gccgo-go's version is misleading at best and actively harmful at > worst, because it *looks* like it's 1.24, and this is where I think > the overlap with the proposal to update to 1.26 appears - that number > drifts even further from any truth. > > In ideating on solutions, I was thinking about doing something really > goofy, like having bin:gccgo-go have a Version: that's 1.18 or > something, but that ship has sailed (we can't downgrade in the > archive), and it would be really poor behavior for one source package > to do that anyhow. > > So concretely, what I'd propose for src:golang-defaults 1.26+ is that > we remove all traces of gccgo entirely instead. This is somewhat > disruptive, but I don't think it's unreasonable. Every interesting > architecture is currently supported by upstream golang-go, gccgo > hasn't been a suitable GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP for Go itself for several > versions now, and gccgo is a very outdated implementation. On top of > all that, I strongly doubt there are many (if any) meaningful Go > packages left in the archive that really successfully build with > gccgo. > > I am going to work on an even more concrete MR for review after > sending this email. 🙇
As promised: https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/compiler/golang-defaults/-/merge_requests/5 (and a tiny follow-up to remove the last bits of Perl code from the package: https://salsa.debian.org/go-team/compiler/golang-defaults/-/merge_requests/6) ♥, - Tianon
