Fedora Core 4 Test 1 Status - Slip

[Bill Nottingham]

Looking at the overlap of the FC4 schedule with the GCC 4.0 schedule,
it appears that shipping GCC 4.0 in FC4 has become viable.

In order to avoid a large duplication of bandwidth by rebuilding
with GCC 4.0 between test releases, Fedora Core 4 Test 1 has now
slipped two weeks to allow for integration of a GCC 4.0 snapshot,
and rebuilds against it.

Fedora Core 4 Test 1 is now scheduled for March 14; the schedule
at http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/schedule/ will be updated
shortly.

Quick FAQs:

- Is GCC 4.0 released yet?

  No. It's likely to be released around mid-April.

- Does that mean Fedora Core 4 will ship with a pre-release compiler?

  We're not *that* crazy. If GCC 4.0 is delayed, we will either
  revert, or slip.

- What's so cool about GCC 4.0?

  GCC 4.0 includes:
  
  - new intermediate languages that allow for new/better optimizations
    http://gcc.gnu.org/projects/tree-ssa/
    
    As part of this, this allows for better compile and run-time memory
    checking and overflow protection.
    
  - better and more complete Java support
  - Fortran 95 support
  
- Is GCC 4.0 ABI compatbile with GCC-3.4.x?

  - For C/C++, yes.

Bill