Ryan Murray posted the news to debian-devel-announce yesterday. After long preparations and tests (and waiting for gcc to compile and work properly on m68k – Robot101) Debian has finally changed the default compiler to gcc 3.2 on all architectures in the Sid branch.
Debian “Sid” Switches to GCC 3.2 as Default Compiler
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it will ship in 2 years?
kidding
And only a few months after FreeBSD 5.0! also kidding
i know its taken a while to do this, but why did it. I’m not complaining just curious is it the time it takes to recompile it all or is there some more serious issues with stability compared to 2.96 speed set aside. I do wish however they set i586 as the new binary compile i know people run systems on old hardware but a 386 no way (and if may how many as a percent)
here it goes all my c++ applications
Debian is pretty cool, they at least make sure everything works, they port a lot of stuff, like xfree86 to the other platforms, and it’s stable
the i386 compiles are with i686 optimizations, and if you really want to you could use apt-build to compile it to you’re own arch, or set up you’re own build mirror.
Debian was my first, and still is the only linux distro with a good sense of priorities
my .02cents
w00t to Robot101
Debian supports a load of different architectures, and GCC 3.2 needs to work correctly on them all. There’s also a lot of problems in the transition period, unless everything is tested thoroughly. I hope that’s what’s been going on. It’ll be problematic anyway.
Also: Debian has to be upgradeable. That’s what makes it rock. No booting from CD, just typing in the few needed commands. The transition should not break apt, even though it uses C++.
By daniel omen (IP: —.in-addr.btopenworld.com) – Posted on 2003-01-08 23:09:19
i know its taken a while to do this, but why did it. I’m not complaining just curious is it the time it takes to recompile it all or is there some more serious issues with stability compared to 2.96 speed set aside. I do wish however they set i586 as the new binary compile i know people run systems on old hardware but a 386 no way (and if may how many as a percent)
————-
yes, people still use older hardware.
and gcc 2.96 isn’t a real release. it’s the gcc used by some (unresponsible) linux distributions.
gcc 3.2 is also much faster.
gcc 3.2 is probably stabler than gcc 2.96 simply because gcc 2.96 doesn’t officially exist.
they introduce major changes into debian sid. if it breaks anything – that’s what sid is for. for testing things that may/will be unstable. but they won’t just put things in there without testing them. debian supports many platforms + they want to keep em all in sync.
actualy…experimental is used for that…unstable is actualy very stable, no less stable than mandrake.
I hope it’s actually 3.2.1. 3.2 contained a few bugs, and the GCC steering committe recommends 3.2.1 instead.
from distrowatch.com, it’s GCC 3.2.2 …. hmmmm…
that means everybody but NetBSD is on 3.2 as their default GCC, i think at least
Hopefully the guys at Debian can pull this off. They’ve given me no reason to doubt their abilities.
But to respond to daniel omen, there are tons of people who still use i386 machines. Hell, it’s all you need and more with Debian.
nxtw: gcc 2.95.4 didn’t officially exist either, but Debian’s been using it for ages
Also, some developers (and myself, though not a d-d (yet?)) feel that sid is being treated too lightly. Sid used to be where you’d throw questionable but “probably okay, works here” stuff so it’d get a good deal of testing. That has since devolved to the job of experimental instead (and no one knows why, really, other than “I don’t want my sid system broken just so I can fix your package screw-up”). But I’m glad that they finally just said “look, the plan has been in place for a while, it’s been discussed, this is what we’re doing” and that they finally just did the switch to 3.2.x as the default.
daniel omen: http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel – have fun reading all the “omg 386?!?” messages in the archives, they’re not going to up the default to 586. A few select packages REALLY benefit from arch-specific compilation (kernel, crypto, etc.), and they DO have special packages for each arch in the archive.
Isn’t that one of the beautiful things about Debian? And that’s what I like about it.