The race to GCC 3

[mark at buttery.org (Mark J. Dulcey)]

David Kramer wrote:
> On Friday 27 September 2002 12:21 pm, Mark J. Dulcey wrote:
> 
>>It looks like the move to GCC 3 is finally on. MandrakeSoft wins the race
>>to the gate with LinuxMandrake 9.0, which can be downloaded now. (Packaged
>>versions won't be available for a month, though.) Red Hat will follow on
>>Monday with Red Hat Linux 8.0, and SuSE follows close behind with SuSE
>>Linux 8.1, due October 7. All three include GCC 3.2 and kernel 2.4.19.
> 
> 
> So I guess we won't be able to easily upgrade from 7.3 to 8.0.  I spent way 
> too much time getting my server right to start from e2fsck again.

It's not supposed to mean any such thing, at least not if all the binaries you use are from the distribution. The update will replace all your old packages with new ones that were built with GCC 3.2, and in theory, all will be well.

If you use a lot of self-built binaries, or binaries that are downloaded from other sources, things may be a bit more difficult. In some cases, the old binaries won't work, and you'll have to rebuild or download new ones. KDE apps will likely take the worst hit, because KDE and Qt are written in C++, as are most KDE applications.

We'll all know more once people have actually gotten some experience with the new distributions. I wouldn't rush out and upgrade production servers. So long as you're keeping up with the security updates, there isn't any compelling reason to upgrade a server right away, in any case.