[R-sig-Debian] Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak uses GCC 6 but -std=c++98 is missing

[Dirk Eddelbuettel]

On 13 November 2016 at 09:32, George N. White III wrote:
| Unless intractable problems arise, wider use of gcc-6 outside of LTS releases
| should be encouraged.

That is being done, and has been done for years. Ie gcc-7 just got into
Debian unstable but BDR has been testing with it for a while now. Ditto with
gcc-6 when it was bleeding fresh.

There is nothing you can prescribe here. We are all caught between the
dimwitted enterprises with RHEL versions built by the Romans deploying
gcc-4.4, and these shiny newer things at the other side.

All we can do is test the crap out of it, and we do! Services like rhub help.
And of course developers willing to go the extra mile.  And tools like Docker
make it _trivial_ to keep another build environment, compiler version,
compiler tooling (UBSAN !!) etc pp

| is not alone in using gcc-6.  If gcc-6 was a disaster, there would be bug

We would have known a year or longer ago.  It has been a default in Debian
unstable and testing for a pretty long time.

| https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/README.html says there is support
| for Yakkety Yak, but the sample sources.list lines lack an entry for yakkety.

The rest of your post conflates these issue with what ill-educated users on
derivative distros we do not (formally, lack of volunteers) support.

There is Debian support on CRAN thanks to tireless effort by Johannes, and
Ubuntu support thanks to Michael.  If someone breaks his Mint box in despair
by going out of distro it is really their problem.  We can't fix all possible
installations for all people.

We aim to cover the main ones here, and I dare say we do pretty well --- but
alarmist posts don't help. I know you mean well but some things needed
clarification.   For background,  distros which know what they are doing have
transition plans.  See eg these from Debian

        https://wiki.debian.org/GCC6
        https://wiki.debian.org/GCC5  (just for reference)

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org