When I recently installed Etch via a net-install it placed both the gcc 3.3.5 and gcc 4.0.1 on my system. Neither can be removed by itself as there are too many deps, and so they remain together. Why is/would/should there be a need and purpose for both of them? They both show up in synaptic as being installed.

However this is the command output:

# gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 4.0.1 (Debian 4.0.1-2)
Copyright (C) 2005 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I'm guessing it's because there are some major differences between 3.x and 4.x (I think I read something about this before), and so they have included both so you have the compatibility until they have stabilized 4.x... I'm not entirely sure though.

I thought if you wanted to go for compatability you could always do so

make CC=gcc-3.3

Atleast that is how I compile things for my 3.3 built kernel on sid. Seems more like the repo's are broken.

Until all packages are built with gcc 4.0 both gcc versions will have to co-exist.
It shouldn't hurt anything.Eventually gcc 4 will be the norm.

It was causing me issues as the 4.0 version won't build the 2.6.8 kernel source, but I was able to change the symlink in /usr/bin to the existing 3.3 install and it finished nicely.