[gentoo-dev] RFC: news item for the 17.0 profiles

[Andreas K. Huettel]

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Title: New 17.0 profiles in the Gentoo repository
Author: Andreas K. Hüttel <dilfridge@g.o>
Posted: xxxxxxx
Revision: 1
News-Item-Format: 2.0
Display-If-Installed: >=sys-devel/gcc-6.4.0

We have just added a new set of profiles with release version 17.0
to the Gentoo repository. These bring two changes:
1) The default C++ language version for applications is now C++14.
   This change is mostly relevant to Gentoo developers. It also
   means, however, that compilers earlier than GCC 6 are masked 
   and not supported for use as a system compiler anymore. Feel 
   free to unmask them if you need them for specific applications.
2) Where supported, GCC will now build position-independent
   executables (PIE) by default. This improves the overall
   security fingerprint. The switch from non-PIE to PIE binaries,
   however, requires some steps by users, as detailed below.

Please consider switching from your current 13.0 profile to the
corresponding 17.0 profile soon after GCC-6.4.0 has been 
stabilized on your architecture. The 13.0 profiles will be deprecated 
and removed in the near future.

Switching involves the following steps: 
If not already done,
* Use gcc-config to select gcc-6.4.0 or later as system compiler
* Re-source /etc/profile:
    . /etc/profile
* Re-emerge libtool
Then, 
* Select the new profile with eselect
* Re-emerge, in this sequence, gcc, binutils, and glibc
    emerge -1 sys-devel/gcc:6.4.0
    emerge -1 sys-devel/binutils
    emerge -1 sys-libs/glibc
* Rebuild your entire system
    emerge -e world

If you do not follow these steps you may get spurious build
failures when the linker tries unsuccessfully to combine non-PIE
and PIE code.
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-- 
Andreas K. Hüttel
dilfridge@g.o
Gentoo Linux developer (council, perl, libreoffice)