status of gcc 4.3 in your distribution?

[Lucas Nussbaum]

Hi,

I was wondering about the status of gcc 4.3 in the various distros. When
are you going to switch to building with 4.3 by default? How will you
manage the direction flag issue[1]?

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/272048/

In Debian lenny (due around september 2008, unofficially), gcc 4.3 is
currently the default compiler on most arches, but not on i386 and amd64
(where it's gcc 4.2).

We don't want to break upgrades from Debian etch to lenny (which could
happen with a kernel affected by the DF issue if the user hasn't
installed all the latest updates for etch), so we have two choices:

(1) ship a fixed kernel and use gcc 4.2 for lenny, then make the switch
to 4.X (X > 2) in lenny+1 (since upgrades would then happen with the
fixed kernel).

(2) use a modified gcc 4.3 (and still ship a fixed kernel, of course),
with a patch that makes gcc output CLD by default, so lenny binaries can
work with an etch kernel (the patch can then be dropped in lenny+1). The
Debian gcc maintainer doesn't want to do that, since it would cause
Debian's gcc to generate different code than upstream gcc, and makes it
harder to report bug upstream.

So solution (1) is currently implemented, but this might still change.
-- 
| Lucas Nussbaum
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