Re: Selecting GCC release

Juergen Harms schrieb:
> 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.

FYI: The mentioned discussion starts here:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/avr-gcc-list/2016-05/msg00009.html

The issue was filed as https://gcc.gnu.org/PR71151 and bugzilla says 
it's fixed since v6.2.

> 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?

It depends whether you want bleeding edge or be conservative.
The X.1 release is the 1st one hitting user land.  And after all, GCC
is software, hence there will be bugs :-/

Problems fixed in v6.2: 
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=6.2&list_id=181687

Problems fixed in v6.3: 
https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?bug_status=RESOLVED&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=6.3&list_id=181687

Johann