[OE-core] [PATCH 6/7] gcc6: Upgrade to 6.4

[Khem Raj]

On Mon, Oct 16, 2017 at 4:53 AM, Otavio Salvador
<otavio.salvador at ossystems.com.br> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2017 at 5:06 PM, Andre McCurdy <armccurdy at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, Oct 14, 2017 at 10:21 PM, akuster808 <akuster808 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> why do we continue to maintain 2 versions of gcc?
>>
>> Probably the same reason why Buildroot continues to maintain 4
>> versions of gcc, it's useful for end users.
>>
>>   https://git.buildroot.net/buildroot/tree/package/gcc
>
> We keep all user space and toolchain up to date so upgrading the GCC
> is straightforward.  That said the gcc cannot vary from one machine to
> another so if a vendor wants to use an old release, it can be done
> using their distro.
>
> I am against maintaining two GCC versions as it increases the amount
> of testing needed. Instead I'd prefer to have clang merged on oe-core
> instead and easy its adoption / test.

In practice, there are a large set of applications that customers have porting
to do when major compiler version changes (e.g. 6 to 7), unless there
is a feasible path for upgrade people
will refrain from upgrading to newer versions of releases. Its not a
trivial task
to upgrade systemdwide compiler in any distro. So its a good strategy to have
two versions overlapping for few releases, this smoothens the migration for
large application bases.