GCC 8 is available in testing/unstable, and upstream is approaching the first point release. I am planning to make GCC 8 the default at the end of the week (gdc and gccgo already point to GCC 8). Most runtime libraries built from GCC are already used in the version built from GCC 8, so I don't expect runtime incompatibilities anymore. There is one more transistion involved, bumping the libgfortran version.
A pre-release version of binutils 2.31 is in testing now, and the final 2.31 release in unstable. These are the major versions for the upcoming buster release, still planning updates to a potential GCC 8.3.0 (estimated Jan 2019) release and binutils 2.31.1 release, or doing equivalent updates from the release branches. There are still a bunch of build failures triggered by GCC 8 [1], so fixing these should get some priority now. See [2] for changes in GCC 8, and the porting guide [3]. I'll be at DebCamp for the second half of the week, and at DebConf, so if there is interest for bug squashing sessions, feel free to grab me, and we can schedule such sessions on a short notice. GCC 5 and GCC 6 are going away, and I am planning the same with GCC 7 as soon as there are upstream kernel and glibc releases which are released after the GCC 8.1.0 release from April. The Debian release team lists toolchain support for our release architectures, and according to [4], the amd64, i386, armel, armhf, arm64 architectures are supported as primary architectures, and s390x is supported as a secondary architectures. Some notes on other candidates for release architectures: - armel: The armv4t default isn't used very much anymore, and we had issues in the past. - armhf: While arm-linux-gnueabihf is not explicitly listed as a primary architecture, I'm told that the arm-linux-armeabi triplet covers the hard float variants as well. - ppc64el: Not documented as primary architecture, but according to the backend maintainers the powerpc64-linux-gnu triplet includes the le variant. - mips*: There is no support for any mips-linux target either as a primary or secondary release architecture (only bare metal), which matches the experience with mips specific issues for the past Debian releases. I understand that port maintainers want to have their port included as a release architecture, however it becomes a burden if neither the upstream nor the Debian port maintainers can keep up with the general upstream development. Maybe we need something in between the alternatives of being a release arch or not, having the benefit of packages in testing/stable, but not being supported in a release. Matthias [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?tag=ftbfs-gcc-8;users=debian-...@lists.debian.org [2] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-8/changes.html [3] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-8/porting_to.html [4] https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-8/criteria.html
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