Selecting GCC release

We need to upgrade the AVR GCC cross-compiler package of the Mageia 
distro, the present package uses GCC-4.8.1.

Simply packaging the latest available GCC release would be a naive 
approach, as illustrated in last years ML thread on "GCC 6.1.0, strings 
and PROGMEM": a year ago - about 1 month after its release date - GCC 
6.x was considered to still need some stabilising, the advice was to use 
5.x.

How is the situation now?  does 7.1.0  still has issues wrt to using it 
in the avr toolchain? can we get advice which GCC release to select for 
packaging into a more or less typical Linux distro?

Thanks in advance, Juergen Harms