Work on implementing GCC 6 in Fedora started

Dec 23, 2015 01:00 GMT  ·  By

It has been a while since we saw any interesting system-wide changes proposed for the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system, but today we can report that the OS will switch to GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) 6 by default.

A new proposal has been published on the Fedora Wiki, and it reveals the fact that the Fedora Project developers are working on upgrading the GCC packages to the latest and most advanced version available right now on the market, GCC 6.x, for Fedora 24. The OS should see the light of day on May 17, 2016, if everything goes according to plan.

Switching the GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) package in Fedora 24 Linux to the 6.x.y branch means that the Fedora developers need to rebuild all the distribution's packages. Alternatively, they can choose to optionally rebuild only various important packages and rebuild the entire archive for the next major release, Fedora 25.

"GCC 6 is currently in stage3, will move to stage4 around mid-January, in prerelease state with only regression bugfixes and documentation fixes allowed. The release will happen probably in the middle of April. We are working on scratch GCC RPMs and will perform a test mass rebuild," reads the proposal on the Fedora Wiki.

Fedora 24 Alpha arrives in February

The development cycle of the Fedora 24 Linux distribution will start at the end of January, when the Fedora Project devs will branch Fedora 24 from Rawhide, which will become the base for Fedora 25. Then, the Alpha build will be out the door on March 1, 2016, followed by the Beta version one and a half months later, on April 12.

Therefore, until the February 2 branching of Fedora 24, the Fedora Linux developers will have to do a mass rebuild with the new GCC 6. Packages that have direct dependencies on a certain GCC version, such as odb, libtool, gcc-python-plugin, and llvm, will also have to be rebuilt. More details can be found at http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-6/porting_to.html.