GCC 5 Will End Up Coming To Fedora 22

Earlier this month it didn't look like GCC 5 would be added to Fedora 22 unless the release was delayed and at least week's FESCO meeting, the committee decided not to delay Fedora 22. After this week's FESCo meeting, GCC 5 will now be added as the Fedora 22 compiler while still aiming for a mid-May release.

What's changed to get GCC 5 into Fedora 22 without slipping the release to have time for a mass rebuild? Now the plan is to put GCC 5 in Fedora 22 but to only do a partial rebuild. When GCC 5 is added to Fedora 22, only the packages that have direct dependencies on the exact GCC version will be rebuilt, like libtool, LLVM, GCC plug-ins, etc. Packages that don't have dependencies on an exact GCC version will be left untouched unless the specific package maintainers opt to volunteer for a GCC 5 package build -- assuming the packages build fine, which should be fine for the most part given that the GCC 4 to GCC 5 changes aren't as invasive as when going from GCC 3 to GCC 4.

The official release of GCC 5 is expected in early April while the latest pre-release will be added to Fedora 22 / Rawhide in short order to facilitate testing. The mass rebuild of all Fedora packages under GCC 5 rather than GCC 4.9 will wait until the Fedora 23 cycle.

Details via the Fedora Project Wiki that was approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee at yesterday's IRC meeting. It's great to see GCC 5 get in for Fedora 22 given that the compiler update is very significant and brings many exciting features and improvements.