Unless Fedora 22 Is To Be Delayed, GCC 5 Might Not Make It

While Fedora developers have been trying hard for Fedora 22 to be released on time and be stricter about time-based releases with Fedora releases currently being notorious for delays, there's already some challenges with the fresh Fedora 22 plans for releasing in mid-May.

One of the features/changes for Fedora 22 that's been proposed is to ship GCC 5 as the system compiler for this Fedora Linux update. Fedora tends to always ships with the bleeding edge GCC compiler release given that many upstream GCC developers are from the Red Hat / Fedora camp. However, GCC 5 only days ago ended its feature development to concentrate on bug-fixing. GCC 5 will probably not be released until late March or early April at the earliest, which is rather late in the F22 cycle if it's to be released on 19 May.

Coming up quite quickly they would need to switch over to GCC 5 as the base compiler and do a mass rebuild of all Fedora 22 packages, which could quite quickly cause problems with Fedora 22's schedule. Besides needing the time to re-compile all of the packages, any broken builds need to be fixed. Broken packages are a possibility with any major GCC upgrade but especially with GCC 5 since it now defaults to C11 (GNU11) rather than GNU89, among other invasive changes this cycle.

GCC 5 and Fedora 22's time-based schedule is now being freshly debated today via this Fedora mailing list thread. Jakub Jelinek, a key GCC developer at Red Hat, is already saying, "if we want to turn Fedora into a collection of obsolete software rather than trying to lead progress, we don't have to update anything [to GCC 5 for Fedora 22]...It turns Fedora from being one of the first distros to ship the new compilers to one of the last if not the last one."

GCC 5 does bring many interesting compiler features so it will be interesting to see how the situation plays out... If GCC 5 is accepted, it will likely mean Fedora 22 is delayed, which is a habit that the developers have been trying to address. Today the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee is already going to evaluate the schedule again due to the short timing for having a mass-rebuild of packages. If FESCo presses hard against any delays, it could mean no GCC 5 or any new F22 features that require rebuilding all of the Fedora packages. Stay tuned for the results from that meeting later today.

UPDATE: A decision has been made.