Ryan Hill <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Sun, 30 Jul 2006 16:56:47 -0600:
> Most major archs have at least some version of 3.3 and 3.4 available in > stable. Sometimes even 2.95, and some lucky winners have 4.1 in ~arch. > amd64 has 3.3 masked for some reason i don't understand, and other > arches might too. i'm just going off of what eshowkw tells me. FWIW on amd64 and gcc (as a Gentoo/amd64 user not necessarily privy to certain Gentoo/amd64 dev team details) ... gcc-3.3 is masked on amd64 due to multilib issues. Gentoo/amd64 multilib handling has matured and changed over time, with the new handling being introduced and stabilized along with a new profile and gcc-3.4. gcc-3.3 wasn't upgraded to the new multilib handing, in part because its amd64 support wasn't all that great anyway -- it worked, but was "bolted on" and it showed -- so with 3.4's amd64 handling being better already, and limited resources available, 3.3 was masked on what was then the new profiles, and support deprecated and eventually phased out in parallel with the older profiles and their older multilib handling. Actually, talking gcc4 now, on amd64, I'd compare the jump from 3.4 to 4.1 to a full version jump if not more, 3.1 to 4.1 if not 2.9x to 4.1, on x86. Thus it wouldn't surprise me to see 3.4 go the way of 3.3, some time in 2007. It can remain keyworded but masked for those who want to play with the older versions beyond that, but without any sort of support for those choosing to do so. Again, I'm not a devel and my opinions do not the future path of Gentoo/amd64 denote, but there's a big enough difference in performance, IMO, that beyond a reasonable gcc4 stabilization and gcc3 deprecation period, it makes little sense to continue to support gcc3. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
