On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 2:54 PM Neal Gompa <ngompa13@gmail.com> wrote:

On Thu, Oct 22, 2020 at 8:27 AM Aleksandra Fedorova <alpha@bookwar.info> wrote:
>
> Hi, all,
>
> this is the informational message, no action required.
>
> Upon agreement between gcc maintainers and ELN SIG we would like to
> switch ELN buildroot to use GCC11 ahead of Fedora Rawhide.
>
> Though ELN is defined as the buildroot where Fedora Rawhide code is
> rebuilt into EL-like environment, in the ELN proposal we also
> mentioned that ELN can be used to test certain buildroot-related
> features on the side so it doesn't block Fedora Rawhide development.
>
> We think that GCC11 is one such feature, where we can benefit from
> testing it first on a small subset of the Fedora content in a separate
> environment.
>
> We would like to invite everyone to join this effort.
>
> The work is currently tracked on Github:
> https://github.com/fedora-eln/eln/issues/8
>
> Once GCC11 is merged to the eln tag in koji, one would be able to use
> it via, for example, mock or container environment:
> quay.io/fedoraci/fedora:eln-x86_64
>
> For more info on ELN please refer to ELN Docs (as soon as I update
> them, which hopefully happens later today):
>
> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/eln/
>

Why are you not just doing this in Rawhide? I feel like we've been
screwed now because the whole point was that ELN branches weren't
going to exist, and now we have one in the most important package!

"We're screwed" is a bit harsh, but beyond that, I second to what Neal said.

Historically, new gcc releases have landed in rawhide right before a mass rebuild and then there's often been fallout in the mass rebuild due to the new compiler. And then afterwards there's a lot of crunch to get all of the fallout from the new compiler fixed quickly before the Beta release.

I think it would be much smoother to introduce new gcc releases earlier in the cycle (as in, now would be a good time) to give packagers time to fix things up before the mass rebuild starts.

I'm very much trying to get things moving in this direction.  The current model of waiting until just before the mass rebuild for even numbered Fedora releases is far from ideal.  It's hard on the Fedora maintainer community as a whole and it's hard on the GCC community.  We'd both be better served with earlier drops of the development versions of gcc into rawhide, IMHO.

While we may not get to the state that glibc is in (dropping in development snapshots weekly), I do think we should be looking at a drop of a gcc-11 snapshot into rawhide roughly at the same time that gcc-11's stage1 development window closes (mid-Nov) with semi-regular updates from that point.

Jeff