On Mon, Apr 24, 2017 at 07:59:53PM +0200, Guilherme Amadio wrote:
> 
> I would rather prefer to keep essential development tools in tree.
> GCC is not only used as system compiler, but also for development.
> I already had problems before with CMake being aggressively removed,
> so I couldn't just install CMake 3.5.2 to test something that got
> broken with the latest CMake (3.7.2 at the time).
>
> For things like autotools, CMake, compilers, etc, I would like to
> see at least the latest release of the previous major version (e.g.
> CMake 2.8), and the last few latest releases from the current major
> version (e.g. CMake 3.{5,6,7}). Similarly for essential libraries,
> as in prefix you may be somewhat limited by the host (think macOS),
> so removing old ebuilds aggressively breaks stuff. I think this was
> the case with clang before, where we needed 3.5 and that got removed,
> so bootstrapping on macOS was broken for sometime.

That's completely reasonable. My concern is that we have the following
versions of gcc in the tree:

gcc-2.95.3-r10
gcc-3.3.6-r1
gcc-3.4.6-r2
gcc-4.0.4
gcc-4.1.2
gcc-4.2.4-r1
gcc-4.3.6-r1
gcc-4.4.7
gcc-4.5.4
gcc-4.6.4
gcc-4.7.4
gcc-4.8.5
gcc-4.9.3
gcc-4.9.4
gcc-5.4.0
gcc-5.4.0-r3
gcc-6.3.0

Under your proposal, I guess we would just have gcc-5.4.0-r3, gcc-4.9.4
and maybe gcc-3.4.6-r2 and *definitely maybe* gcc-2.95.3-r10. Is this
correct?

William