Hello everyone. I see that LFS/BLFS is moving to gcc 6.1.0 compiler in the development builds. Just wondering if anyone here has upgraded to this version. If so, have you had any issues along the way? Any reasons you can think of for or against upgrading? Thanks!

Paul

Pro: it's new and improved, and if you're building everything anyway (LFS, right?) why not?
Con: if it isn't broken why fix it?

As with any upgrade, there ought to be a concrete reason you want to use it. Either there's a specific new feature you need, or something else you use will depend on the new version, so you're forced to upgrade. Upgrading for its own sake is fine if you're beta testing or developing, but otherwise probably not rational.

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Hi hpmachining

I have just built the systemd version using 6.1.0 all went well, lxde running ok

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Thanks for the input. So far I have just been playing around building on flash drives. I succeeded in building a working Xfce desktop with Gedit, Firefox, Thunderbird, Gimp, Qt 5.5.1 (with Creator), FFmpeg and Audacious on a 16 GB flash drive. I had to mount another drive to build a couple of the bigger packages. It was good practice, and I figure I can use it as a host system for future builds.

Next I want to build a system on a 120GB SSD drive and was debating the following options:
1) Restore a LFS-7.9 systemd (with some BLFS applications) image as the base, upgrade gcc to 6.1 using BLFS instructions, and build BLFS systemd dev components from scratch.
2) Restore the same image as 1, but install BLFS without upgrading compiler.
3) Starting everything from scratch, using LFS development book, which is using gcc 6.1.

I hope that explains why I am looking at upgrading the compiler. I appreciate any feedback anyone has.

Thanks again!
Paul

FYI it's always best to build a new LFS with LFS as the host as you know its compliant

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Take care with gcc-6.x. It is new, but it is being discussed in the mailing list with having some issues due to the new stricter c++ coding guidelines it's aiming to enforce. c++14 I believe. You may be forced to fall back to gcc-5.x in some cases or llvm+clang to build packages successfully. Patches and updates are coming in to packages, but take extreme care.

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All options will do.
I would go for option 2, usually BLFS will compile on an older LFS and if not you can upgrade a few packages while trying.
Option 3 should be the most painless experience though slowest as you will need to redo LFS again. But then again, LFS takes about a day and BLFS can take up to 2 weeks or more.
Option 1 is interesting as well, do you use a package manager?

I am still running LFS 7.1/7.2 and upgraded the toolchain, then the LFS book to what I thought was safe to use today and build a minimal but useable BLFS.
Because I have a package manager installed (pkgutils from CRUX) it is no hassle to update packages without knowing what files I need to move/delete/edit.

I still use gcc 4.9.3.

Good luck.

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Thanks for the heads up ReaperX7, I started following the dev list about 3 weeks ago and have read about the issues you mentioned. I'm leaning towards staying with 5.3 for my SSD build, and play around with upgrading and fresh build on flash drives just for practice. I actually don't mind a few problems along the way. I learn much more when things go wrong.

hendrickxm, I am not using a package manager yet. What I did was make a list of the BLFS packages with notes, in order of install, for the packages I added to the base LFS to get a console based system that I can work with. I also keep the sources in a separate directory. For the X WIndow packages I got lazy and just kept the sources in separate directories, one for the Xorg build, and one for the desktop. I am going to take a look at pkgutils.

Thanks for the input!
Paul

One way you could manage packages is to use /opt and create scripts to manage your /path/to. It's a dirty method, and very Windowish... but it works.

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