On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 09:33:45AM -0400, Michael Orlitzky wrote: > On 09/23/2014 04:54 AM, Walter Dnes wrote: > > > > Gentoo stable appears to be gcc-4.7.3-r1. ebuilds up to gcc-4.9.1 are > > present in the tree. Upgrading gcc is painful, so I appreciate the > > maintainers not forcing a rebuild with every version bump. That's the > > philosophy behind "stable". The tradeoff is that we have to wait longer > > for "new and shiney" stuff. For those who want it, you can always > > keyword a later version of gcc. > > > > Stabilization of GCC is especially careful because if your GCC winds up > broken, you might not be able to fix it (emerge won't work). > > And since GCC is used to build everything else on your system, it can't > go stable until all upstream packages are fixed or patched to work with > the new GCC. > > There's usually a tracker for those packages. For gcc-4.9 it's at, > > https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=gcc-4.9
Since gcc is slotted (I actually have 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9 on my systems). That argument doesn't count much, imho. I personally didn't encounter a single breakage after updating from 4.8 to 4.9 (this was different from 4.7 to 4.8). IIRC 4.7 isn't supported by upstream anymore and there are known (security) bugs. I don't really know why not at least 4.8 is stable.
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