Last night the Gentoo/PowerPC-team had its monthly meeting. Our main-topic was the upcoming 2006.1-release and if we want to switch the toolchain. gcc-4.1.1 gives a lot of advantages especially for PowerPCs and all devs tested this compiler-version during the last weeks. There are some troubles with strict-aliasing, but this can be changed in the ebuilds and notify upstream about the problem. Furthermore we will change to glibc-2.4, so that users will have one big move instead of several small moves.
For the upgrade I already created a 2006.1-profile which relies on this toolchain. An older gcc and glibc is masked in that new profile. Then I masked the newer toolchain in the current 2006.0-profile, so that users, who want to test the new toolchain have to switch the profile. And we can stabelise the new packages already without any trouble for the user, as long as he doesn’t change the profile. I consinder the new profile is testing as long as the 2006.1-release isn’t out.
Another topic was the stabelisation of Xorg-7.1 on ppc. I expected some objections and so I’m really glad that even Gentoo’s Xorg-maintainer, Donnie Berkholz, suggests all arches, which don’t have problems with binary drivers (that means all beside x86), should switch to the new Xorg.
I think, I’ll add the new Xorg as stable in the 2006.1-snapshot and make it stable for everybody later. Or I will mask some package-versions in the profile like I did with the toolchain.
Power-users are welcome to test the new toolchain and Xorg-7.1, and report bugs when something goes wrong.
But all in all 2006.1 will be a big step for Gentoo/PowerPC. I hope we can stay the best ppclinux-Distro ever 😛