My little story in upgrading gcc from 2.95 to 3.2.1

[tecknojunky]

1st off. I never succesfully got my Gentoo box to be fully functionnal. Not that it was not working at all, but since I installed it, I had those littles things here and there that I never got to get working properly. Just a few examples:

- I never found a way to decently implement bash colorization with the help of dircolors. Not crucial, since I generaly boot so few times, I simply manually set a LS_OPTIONS variable in the environment.

- Alsa has some modules defines that are not compiled. Agin, I simply ignore them... for now.

- updating Xfree to 4.2.1 and I could not get dri going anymore.

And lots of others, just a few from the top of my mind.

The dri was the most painfull one, on a performance stand point. I finally identified the problem to be the precompiled sis_dri X driver I had, was linked to glibc 2.3 and the system had glibc 2.2. SO I either had to find a way to patch x with the sources of sis_dri and reemerge it all, or get glibc 2.3 in there.

Since I had (more recently) installed gentoo on 486 for development/testing purpose, it's not because you use the same install CD that you end up with the same system. So my 486 had strictly glibc-3.2.1 and glibc-2.3. Compiling on a 486 is simply out of the question, and I learned about distcc. Cool, but for distcc, it's better that volonteers box be the same compiler and libraries. All this made me opt for upgrading my main gentoo box.

I followed the upgrading howto. Not that I want to judge it's accuracy, it seem well made, but i had doubts since the 486 itself had problems with the new setup which was due to gcc-config being somewhat flaky (my neophyte opinion). And, the upgrade failed in the stage 3 (part where you rebuild the base system with gcc-3.2.1 and glibc-2.3). I was not suprised and even was prepared for that. So I retraced the code to find out what was wrong. I was suprised to find that the compiler being called was still gcc-2.95, althought, following the howto it say you should be now on 3.2.1. I'm sure there is part mentionning about checking that but I did not (stupid me). I tried gcc-config but it does not work (did it ever for someone?). So since the gcc-config is so intuitive, I opted to simply delete the gcc in /usr/bin so that the good gcc would get caught up in the path... so it did. Restarted stage 3 (from scratch) and it completed.

Stage 4 mention that after reboot, you can do an emerge world. Since I wanted (maybe by wrong conception) rebuild everything, I made the difference of what are the packages that were builded by stage 3 and made myself a custom script that reemerged everything else. All seemed to go well (for two days) until, this morning, I could not get cups to emerge. The message was saying tons of unresolvable basic C++ constructs like new() delete(), ... and I knew this was a library problem. What was my suprised that binary compilers (g++, cpp, ...) were still using 2.95!!! haw man, It's been compiling 3 days .

So I did the same thing as previously and simply deleted everything in /usr/bin(g++, cpp, cc, c++, ...) that I knew of, and cups got going again.

Now I have to decide if I should rebuild everything, resume from where it left off, or reinstall from scratch.

Right now, I'm browsing in a twn session because kde is half on glibc-2.2/gcc-2.95 and half glibc-2.3/gcc-3.2.1. At least, glxinfo reports dri is all go .

I complain about that gcc-config. Not that it's not a good idea, just that, I wish I could find some docs that explains clearly how everything is setup (i know, I know... read the code. Yeah, i'm such a good analyst programmer). Also, now I know that removing the compilers bins in /usr/bin will break all sort of other things and I also had a hard time making all this work with distcc, ccache and colorgcc. A good doc on that please, for analyst programmers wannabees like me.

Yes, there's the "pitfalls of gcc-3.2.1..." thread, but I did not feel up to read 5 pages of posts on my 640x480 desktop
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(7 of 9) Installing star-trek/species-8.4.7.2::talax.

[pjp]

Just for reference, detect non gcc-3.2 compiled packages might be helpful.
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