The race to GCC 3

[Mark J. Dulcey]

Bob Keyes wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
> 
> 
>>It looks like the move to GCC 3 is finally on. MandrakeSoft wins the race to the gate with LinuxMandrake 9.0, which can be downloaded now.
> 
> 
> Really? in Debian (testing tree), since Friday the 13th.

I was only counting released versions, not betas or test versions. If we were counting betas, the Red Hat open beta has been available for some time (at least a couple of months), the UnitedLinux closed beta has been around for over a month (the open one was just released), and I suspect closed beta versions of other distributions were also being tested.

I can't speak for how long Debian will take this time around; historically it's been slow to incorporate things in the stable version. But I'm glad to hear that there is some GCC 3 movement there.

I failed to mention Gentoo Linux in the previous message. (Gentoo calls itself a meta-distribution. Unlike other Linux distributions, it comes in SOURCE form. You can build all the binaries on your own computer (it all happens automatically), though there is the option of downloading tarballs with prebuilt binaries.) The upcoming Gentoo 1.4 uses GCC 3.2. 

In any case, the main point remains. The Linux world is about to make a major change. Switching major versions of GCC is probably as major a shift as a new major kernel version, and has the potential to break as many things. A number of programs have required fixes to build with GCC 3.2, mostly because it catches errors that GCC 2.9 didn't. Plus that basic fact that you MUST rebuild all C++ code, and probably SHOULD rebuild everything.