I’ve issued the command ‘gcc --version’ from a shell prompt a.k.a. the bash prompt. I’ve received the following answer:
gcc version 4.3.1 Prerelease version
Can I expect updates in order to get a real production version or is there a way to upgrade the gcc packages from the Index of /repositories in the future?
Kernel or module compilations using such a prerelease version look very risky due to occasional bugs in the compiler suite. I’ve looked at GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF) and there I’ve seen a real production version of gcc! It looks like that OpenSuse is a little behind schedule regarding this piece of software…
Personnally, I don’t really worry about it:
The current gcc’s version is labled as a prereleased version, but I’m pretty sure that devs have backport features from more recent version of gcc.
The problem here is that on point in the release cycle, they have to fix version numbers so sometime they are oblige to release a prerelease version (ex: firefox 3.0b5). However, after version freeze, they can still fix bugs. So the version number will stay at a prereleased version, but stability wont be a prerelease stability.
What may happen in the future:
A: gcc will be updated to a stable version after devs have make sure that the update it wont cause system unstabilities.
Or
B: They will backport bugfixes and features from the stable releases.
You may search with: Webpin
To find if a third-party repo has a more recent version. But it wont be “supported” by the official developmental team.
It’s funny how people put so much value on version numbers and “pre-release-beta-rc” when at the end of the day the final release is going to include a good number of bugs just any other.