Colin Watson wrote:
If they're just on leaf packages, that's OK; their old versions currently in testing are still installable after gcc-defaults is upgraded. My system didn't disappear when I performed the upgrade here.
Indeed, they will remain theoretically installable (as in: there is a conflict-free configuration in which are installed).
Practically, applications that have serious bugs w.r.t. gcc 3.2 in them won't be installable if they require non-trivial libraries: all other binaries will require the c102 version of that library, which conflicts with the old version of the library that the existing binary requires. As "major" applications will see their g++ 3.2 problems fixed, "minor" applications will become "silently uninstallable" over time.
For better or worse, testing doesn't currently track build-dependencies. If it did, then this transition would probably be more difficult. As it is, the fact that libstdc++ has changed soname and is coinstallable with the old versions is a feature that many painful transitions don't share.
Indeed. My estimate was, admittedly, quite conservative. Let's talk about it in 6 months, again :-)
Regards, Martin