lang/gcc46

[Gerald Pfeifer]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2012, Doug Barton wrote:
>> lang/gcc and lang/gcc46 should be fully compatible, without rebuilds
>> necessary.  Only when lang/gcc is going to move to GCC 4.7 later this
>> year would I consider that.
> IMO this highlights the issue that unversioned instances of ports that
> really need versioning (like gcc) are a bad idea. It's much better for
> users to be able to tie their installations to a particular version, and
> then only update when they need to. The fact that someday in the future
> users who innocently upgrade lang/gcc will suddenly find that everything
> relying on libgcc at runtime is now broken pretty much speaks for itself.

The fact that I would consider that, was not supposed to imply
breakage. :-)  I was more thinking better optimization and other
benefits.

In my day job, we have been doing upgrades from GCC 4.x to GCC 4.x+y
run-times quite successfully and without any breakage more than once.
And we've got many, quite many, users.

In other words, if there is a challenge it's not GCC per se, more 
our packaging of it (and some work Bapt is doing on the packaging
infrastructure should help with that).

Gerald