On 4/14/22 06:35, Gerion Entrup wrote:
Hi,
I'm working in academia and in our research we are experimenting a lot
with compilers (and especially different versions and different
compilers).
As a general base for our infrastructure we use Debian Stable
(Bullseye) especially because backports exist so thank you very much
for your work.
Now we have seen that there are no backports in the compiler field,
while there exist versioned packages in testing which are installable
in parallel.
The concrete packages we are interested in are clang/llvm-{12..14}
(while 14 is only in unstable currently) and gcc-11.
Do you plan to backport these packages? May I kindly ask you to
backport these packages?
I'm not a Debian expert but hope that backporting would be relatively
simple since the packages are already designed to be installed in
parallel without affecting the other ones.
This doesn't answer your backport question directly but...
Have you considered doing your compiler work inside a
chroot/container/vm that is running newer than stable release? That
would also let you better control the entire build environment and
ensure repeatability, debug more easily, etc. Most Debian development
processes do this for the same reasons. You can also have many
environments in parallel, add and delete them as needed. You could use
one of the debootstrap tools to spin them up with the things you want in
them quickly.
I suspect once you started backporting compilers there will be
additional things you'd want and it might snowball.