Alex Romosan wrote:
I am open to proposals to do this better. Make conflicting libstdc++5 and libstdc++5-3.3 packages is not suitable, as with the first package dependent on libstdc++5-3.3 you are forced to install this version anyway.that will happen when gcc-3.3 becomes the default compiler.
It will happen earlier than that. Anything linked with the libstdc++5-3.3 (even through using the 3.2 headers) will get dependencies to libstdc++5-3.3.
in the meantime gcc-3.2 is the default so i don't think there are any packages out there that depend on the (hypothetical) libstdc++5-3.3.
Any package that is built from now on will have such a dependency. It is not hypothetical, since libstdc++5-3.3 exists today.
just make gcc-3.3 the default compiler and keep everything in sync (the development headers and the library that is) since it looks like you really want to use gcc-3.3 anyway.
That wouldn't achieve the desired testing. For gcc 3.3, it must be tested that both the compiler and the library is completely binary compatible between 3.2 and 3.3. If Debian is not testing that, nobody else is.
There is any reason to believe that they are indeed compatible, and various procedures have been used to establish that trust, including regression test suites in gcc itself. However, none of these tests can replace testing the compatibility "in the wild". These test must happen before gcc 3.3 is released, so that potential incompatibilities can be corrected before the compiler goes into production use.
Now, if Debian would use gcc 3.3 as the system compiler, the efficiency of the testing would be reduced: everything would be compiled with gcc 3.3 after a while, and potential incompatibilities would be hidden by the fact that the compiler and its library are probably more compatible within a version than across versions.
Regards, Martin