On Tue, 2018-01-09 at 18:45 +0100, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 09, 2018 at 09:39:41AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > The timing on this looks a bit awkward when compared with the current
> > schedule, which has the Beta going out in March and Final early in May:
> >
> > https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/28/Schedule
> >
> > That would appear to mean we'd have to do a mass rebuild with a pre-
> > release GCC, or do a mass rebuild between Beta and Final, or suddenly
> > introduce a new compiler post-Beta, potentially meaning that we need to
> > rebuild something to fix a blocker bug quite late in the release and
> > discover that the new GCC which has suddenly appeared causes problems
> > with building it. None of those sound like great options to me.
>
> Mass rebuild with a prerelease version of the compiler, like every year at
> least in the past 10 years in Fedora.
Well, true, but then just like every year, we'll wind up doing a lot of
the spadework of fixing things to build with the new GCC. And probably
at first some critical things will fail to build and that'll mess up
the stability of the distro for a couple of weeks. I guess if everyone
else is still loving that grind, hey.
This is the cost of being "First". Fedora has long enjoyed a tight coupling with the GCC upstream. It's a symbiosis: they use our mass-rebuild to help identify any issues before GCC goes stable and in turn Fedora gets to have the newest compiler features before anyone else.
Realistically, since Fedora is the first real-world exercise of new GCC, if we waited for the upstream stable release, it would be exactly as it is now. Fedora would hit all the same issues and GCC would have to release updates to fix them for us.