If you emerge a new gcc, you have to manually select the new profile. I think it would be interesting in some cases that it could be done automatically, for example in bug #283422 when gcc must be compiled twice. Reproducible: Always
Hmm. Automagic things are bad and tend to break in unpredictable ways ... In terms of ease-of-use it might be nice to have.
I agree that automagic things are not a good idea, but a user selectable/modificable variable is not that automagic (I think), like for example EMERGE_FEATURES, or even GCC_FEATURES or something like that. If it is supposed to be disabled by default, and only enabled by user (or in other cases), it wouldn't harm so much. At least this is my idea, and again, I think it could improve an "automatically" update everything when current stable gcc does not have some feature you need and don't want to waste time in compiling manually gcc first, changing to that new gcc's profile, and after rebuilding all. But anyway, I am not a developer, so it should be reviewed by you first because I could miss some critical things :)
i would really rather not do this. history has shown that automatically selecting profiles is error prone and a pita. for example, what does "new" mean ? does it mean "always latest version installed" or does it mean "the version i just installed" ? what if a user has gcc-4.4.1 installed and needs a secondary gcc-4.0.4 compiler ? switching to 4.0.4 would certainly bust the system.
