Fedora 30 Going Through Its Formalities To Ship With & Built By The GCC 9 Compiler

With each new Fedora release you can pretty much be guaranteed it will be using the latest and greatest releases of the GNOME desktop, the most recent stable kernel, and it's also been very punctual in switching over to new major releases of the GCC compiler -- generally being the first of the major Linux distributions adopting the annual major GNU compiler releases. With Fedora 30 due out in May, it should ship with GCC 9.1 as would be standard practice. It's not guaranteed though as FESCo hasn't signed off on it with this change request coming in past the deadline.

The submission deadline for system-wide change proposals was back on 8 January and it wasn't until today that the GCC 9 change submission was sent in. "This proposal was submitted after the deadline. I am announcing it for community discussion and will leave the decision on whether or not to grant an exception to FESCo."

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee could reject this change for being late, but that would be surprising given Fedora's long history with punctually shipping the new GCC. Besides, there's large overlap between Fedora developers and the GCC developers at Red Hat, often who are involved in the compiler bug triage for the distribution as well as the packaging. Making the transition to GCC 9 pretty much guaranteed albeit against protocol is that GCC 9 in its current form has already landed in Fedora Rawhide.

GCC 9 has been under "stage four" since earlier this month meaning only regression fixes and documentation updates are permitted (as well as new ports like the just-added AMD Radeon GCN back-end). So overall GCC 9 should be in good shape for Fedora Rawhide / F30 testing while the stable GCC 9.1.0 release is expected to be announced by/in April, weeks ahead of Fedora 30's anticipated release date.

GCC 9 is bringing the D language front-end, Intel Icelake support, AMD Zen 2 tuning support, the initial GCN back-end, and a whole lot more (I'll have my GCC 9 feature overview done soon).

So there is the GCC 9 change submission as a formality but should almost certainly be approved by FESCo at their next meeting.