Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: masking old versions of sys-devel/gcc

[Andreas K. Huettel]

Am Mittwoch, 26. April 2017, 02:37:17 CEST schrieb Francesco Riosa:
> 2017-04-26 0:26 GMT+02:00 Andreas K. Huettel <dilfridge@g.o>:
> > Am Sonntag, 23. April 2017, 14:35:48 CEST schrieb Michał Górny:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I'm thinking of masking old versions of sys-devel/gcc, in particular
> > > older than the 4.9 branch.
> >
> > Masking is fine; some time later (maybe in a few months) I'd even suggest
> > masking all of gcc-4. After all, unmasking them if you really need them is
> > rather easy.
>
> well if the intent is cleaning adding a package mask is just more burden,
> not less.
> If they compile fine with the latest stable gcc better leave them unmasked,
> right?

Except that "switching back" from gcc-5 to gcc-4 doesn't really work, and that 
gcc-4 will happily use gcc-5 libraries, with unintended consequences. 

As far as I understand it, the clean way is to either emerge gcc-5 and set it 
as default, or mask gcc-5 and keep it off your system.

Masking gcc-4 would force people to make a decision.


> > About removing them (what William proposed), I'd keep what we have now. We
> > had
> > this discussion already in lots of detail in the past, and convincing
> > points
> > were made to keep one of each 4.x ...
>
> do you have any pointers or keyword to search?
> Because once upon a time there were incompatible changes frequently (2.95
> => 3.x with x < 4 was bloody) but nowadays everything "C" seem more stable.
> And the switch to c++11 still ongoing started with 4.8 and far less
> problematic.
> Maybe different arches than amd64? Binary packages? Embedded platforms?

I don't know the details anymore, will search later. But blueness was the 
right person to ask.

-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@g.o
Gentoo Linux developer (council, perl, libreoffice)