Re: GCC plans for the squeeze cycle
On 16.08.2009 14:41, Marc Brockschmidt wrote:
Heya,
As announced on dda [RT1], we want to get an impression when releasing
Squeeze is feasible. We have proposed a (quite ambitious) freeze in December
2009, and some developers have noted that their planned changes wouldn't be
possible in this time frame. So, to find out when releasing would work for
most people, it would be great if you could answer the following questions:
* Which major upstream releases of gcc are expected in the next two
years? Which of those are material for Debian stable, which might be a bit
flaky?
GCC-4.4 can be made the default, however I'd like to have some kind of
confirmation from legal/release about the GPLv2 only / LGPLv3+exception discussion.
Ludovic is still in the process of migrating from gnat-4.3 to gnat-4.4, although
he has a better view on the state of this work.
GCC-4.5 release plans are not finalized, although looking at proposed and past
releases, Feb-May 2010 could be a guess. Having this in unstable shouldn't hurt,
but new GCC releases usually introduce more strict requirements which may break
existing packages.
* How much time do you usually need from a new upstream release of gcc
to a stable Debian package in unstable?
Afaics patches for 4.4 should be now applied for most source packages.
In the past we did wait for the .1 release before considering a switch to a new
default compiler. I don't want to change this for 4.5.
* How many "big" transitions will the upcoming changes cause? When should those
happen? Can we do something to make them easier?
Archive test rebuilds and bug reporting as done by Lucas and Martin do help a lot.
A new binutils release is planned for next months. I don't plan any further
updates besides following the next maintenance branch.
GCC-3.3 and GCC-3.4 were removed from unstable. GCC-4.2 should follow, maybe we
can drop GCC-4.3 as well. Imo GCC-4.1 should still be kept as it is still used
as backend for D and Pascal.
Matthias
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