Ok, I've put together an alpha release of compiler-config-2.0. This is a replacement for gcc-config which is alot more configurable

Some notable improvements over gcc-config-1.3.x:
GCC_SPECS and PATH are nolonger set in /etc/env.d/05gcc. Instead, that info is in the config files and extracted by the wrapper. Users can have their own settings rather than use the system compiler. Multilib archs will be able to have more control over the compilers used for each ABI. For example, you can install x86_64-*-gcc-3.4.4 and i686-*-gcc-3.3.6 and choose to use either 3.4.4 or 3.3.6 when compiling code with i686-*-gcc

Ok, so we've gotten a good start on multilib in portage over the past few months. amd64's 2005.0 has been great in some areas and terribly lacking in other areas. We've started seeing more design flaws, and I'm thinking of doing some revisions to the toolchain/profile logic which will allow for much better crossdev toolchain integration as well as phasing out the ABI variable.

ABI was introduced because CHOST was insufficient to ALWAYS determine the ABI being used... The main example for this is mips64-u-l-g. We have no way to distinguish between n32 or n64 with this ABI. Most other examples are a bit more obscure. For instance, we MAY want to make a.out binaries for i386-*.

Well gcc 4.0.0 was released yesterday, and within an hour a bug report was filed with Gentoo's bugzilla asking for an ebuild to be added to portage. I've added this ebuild, but I wanted to take a moment to let everyone know what to expect.

I have no plans to start supporting gcc-4.0.0. This means profiles will remain as they are, and the ebuild will still remain in package.mask. I still recommend using gcc-3.3.x and 3.4.x and will for some time to come. There are two major issues concerning unleashing this new compiler onto the gentoo community.

Firstly, gcc-4 is stricter than gcc-3.4. Many packages will need to be patched to compile correctly with the new compiler. Bugzilla has been getting bug reports (with patches, thank you) ever since we started providing the gcc-4 snapshot ebuilds a few months ago. Glibc is among these packages, so anyone intending to build a system from scratch using the 4.0 compiler should wait until glibc-2.3.6 is released which should include all the gcc4 patches.

Well glibc-2.3.5 has recently been released, and it seems like just yesterday 2.3.4 was out... and now there's already talk of 2.3.6 coming soon with all the gcc4 related patches. Quite frankly, anyone trying to use gcc4 for glibc is just asking for trouble, but I digress.

2.3.5 is mostly a bugfix release, so nothing extremely exciting worth mentioning. I may merge in davem's tls patch for sparc64 tls support into the ebuild if anyone pushes for it, but seeing as how I'm probably the only one who'll make use of it, I'll probably just wait for 2.3.6 which will likely have it.

Since the changeset is rather small over the last release, I plan on keeping this in package.mask for about another week, so please let me know of any regressions you may encounter.