Recently I was helping a user on the forums with his fresh Gentoo installation. And one thing came to my mind. Since stable gcc has been updated to the 3.4.5-r1 version why are the stage[1,2,3] release files outdated? (they contain OLDER version of this specific component) I think it is the high time that (especially) stage3 files should be updated, to relieve (especially) the new users from the pain of upgrading gcc as the very first step in the installation process. It's tedious for the beginners and not necessary in the first place - with the up-to-date stages. Additionaly the Handbook doesn't point new users to the "GCC upgrade guide", so they can pretty easily miss all necessary steps (!!!) That said, it's not only gcc that has been updated since 2006.0 stages were built, but also perl and python (to name only two other major components). Could you please consider creating the updated stages?
Umm... Sure we will. When we do our next release. Creating *any* of the Gentoo release materials takes a *long* time and *lots* of testing. We don't just push them out on a whim. Our release cycle is every 6 months, meaning there won't be any new stages for quite some time. (By the way, the gcc upgrading guide is only when upgrading from a minor version, not a patchlevel version. Doing an upgrade from *any* 3.4.x GCC to another 3.4.x GCC requires nothing more than "emerge -u gcc" and doesn't need any special instructions)
I was referring to something like what was done already, 2005.1-r1 I still remember that there used to be four Gentoo releases in a year ;-) Anyway, I don't really have a problem with that. Thanks for your time and explanation. (would you mind looking at the Bug #132173 also?)
The 4 releases thing only happened for one year, and it was decided that it took *way* too much work for very little benefit. As for the -r1 releases, those are done when there are security issues or bugs of some sort. The same snapshot is used (with a few updates), so everything is still the same version.
