On Tue, Sep 23, 2014 at 09:33:45AM -0400, Michael Orlitzky wrote:
> On 09/23/2014 04:54 AM, Walter Dnes wrote:
> > 
> >   Gentoo stable appears to be gcc-4.7.3-r1.  ebuilds up to gcc-4.9.1 are
> > present in the tree.  Upgrading gcc is painful, so I appreciate the
> > maintainers not forcing a rebuild with every version bump.  That's the
> > philosophy behind "stable".  The tradeoff is that we have to wait longer
> > for "new and shiney" stuff.  For those who want it, you can always
> > keyword a later version of gcc.
> > 
> 
> Stabilization of GCC is especially careful because if your GCC winds up
> broken, you might not be able to fix it (emerge won't work).
> 
> And since GCC is used to build everything else on your system, it can't
> go stable until all upstream packages are fixed or patched to work with
> the new GCC.
> 
> There's usually a tracker for those packages. For gcc-4.9 it's at,
> 
>   https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=gcc-4.9


Since gcc is slotted (I actually have 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9 on my systems). That
argument doesn't count much, imho.
I personally didn't encounter a single breakage after updating from 4.8 to 4.9
(this was different from 4.7 to 4.8).
IIRC 4.7 isn't supported by upstream anymore and there are known (security)
bugs. I don't really know why not at least 4.8 is stable.