Arch Linux Drops GCC 9 From Testing Due To BCache Corruption Bug

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Arch Linux Drops GCC 9 From Testing Due To BCache Corruption Bug

The bleeding-edge Arch Linux distribution has resorted to dropping the GCC 9.1 compiler from testing due to a data corruption bug...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Arch-GCC9-BCache-Corruption-Hit

[Haxk20]

Well. I already built kernel with GCC 9.1. Well time to downgrade and build again.

[wizard69]

Isn’t the point of testing to find bugs?

[GdeR]

Isn’t the point of testing to find bugs?

Indeed.. I don't quite understand the point of dropping something from testing.. but there must be some large userbase of rolling release maniacs who use Arch's testing branch on a daily basis for production, and they have no substitute layers for testing purposes.

[skeevy420]

Indeed.. I don't quite understand the point of dropping something from testing.. but there must be some large userbase of rolling release maniacs who use Arch's testing branch on a daily basis for production, and they have no substitute layers for testing purposes.

Why? Why would you do something that stupid?

[GdeR]

Why? Why would you do something that stupid?

That's beyond my understanding.. I myself consider even using the last Fedora release too audacious for my use case. I generally stay 1 release back if I want something really up to date. Otherwise CentOS.

[caligula]

Why? Why would you do something that stupid?

Ever heard of ricers? Gentoo kind of lost the lead and traction when people got tired of compiling new stage 1 packages 50% of the time they spent on their workstations. Now somebody else compiles the core packages so you can fully focus on pulling the latest dev branches from libreoffice, mesa, and rust in order to produce the fresh hourly builds with -march=native and -O6.

[discordian]

Isn’t the point of testing to find bugs?

Well, bug found?

Critical stuff like this is likely reverted so you can still be "testing" all the remaining stuff.

[TheOne]

Basically archlinux has only 2 channels, stable and testing, if they leave gcc 9 on testing that would mean stable would not receive updates until the gcc bug is fixed, so in order to continue the rolling release model securely, testing repos need to also be in good shape.

So this demonstrates that archlinux is not as volatile like many people says. They catch most bugs on testing and if things don't work correctly they rollback to something that does before shipping to stable.

[grigi]

Ever heard of ricers? Gentoo kind of lost the lead and traction when people got tired of compiling new stage 1 packages 50% of the time they spent on their workstations. Now somebody else compiles the core packages so you can fully focus on pulling the latest dev branches from libreoffice, mesa, and rust in order to produce the fresh hourly builds with -march=native and -O6.

1) Someone has to do it. They are called testers. Useful people those.
2) If you ever used it, Gentoo is actually much more conservative by default than vanilla Arch.