Bug#115353: gcc: cc & gcc should use update-alternatives mechanism

[Matthias Klose <doko@cs.tu-berlin.de>]

marko writes:
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2001 at 10:26:37AM +0200, Matthias Klose wrote:
> > marko writes:
> > > As in subject: I think that cc and gcc should be provided
> > > through update-alternatives mechanism, so user could
> > > switch between gcc272, gcc-2.95 and gcc-3.0 more easily.
> > > 
> > > Eg. use gcc-3.0 for cc but gcc-2.95 for gcc or whatever...
> > 
> > gcc-3.0 doesn't use alternatives to make sure that the preferred
> > system compiler is used when calling 'gcc'. If you want to test
> > gcc-3.0 for a particular package,
> 
> 'preferred' by whom?  I think that this should be controlled by
> sysadmin.  The whole 'alternatives' system for making easy
> for sysadmin to change defaults.  Why gcc is exception?

ld and as are exceptions as well.

use the system compiler to build libfoo, change the system compiler to
gcc-3.0, recompile libfoo (which now depends on libgcc1), upload this
package, you'll get the mess.

> > - use CC=gcc-3.0 CXX=g++-3.0 when configuring/compiling a package
> 
> Yeah, I know that.
> 
> > - make ~<user>/bin/gcc a symlink to gcc-3.0 and add it to your path
> 
> But if I want to do that on system level?

use dpkg-divert