The developers have made the change in the Sid branch

Aug 4, 2015 14:16 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu and Debian developers have been working for some time to make GCC 5.x the default compiler for the project, and they have finally made it. Ubuntu was the first one to achieve this, and now it looks like Debian has joined the party as well.

The decision to upgrade the default compiler is an important one, as it has ramifications throughout the project. Very few components have such a huge impact on all the packages in a distro, so it's understandable why it took them such a long time to make it happen. Even so, the change has been made in the Sid branch, which means that it will take some time until it trickles down into the stable version as well.

"Finally sid deserves its name again. GCC 5 is now the default in unstable and packages for the follow-up transitions are (and can be) uploaded to unstable.  Thanks for getting to the point where we could make GCC 5 the default, fixing hundreds of issues, thanks to package maintainers fixing issues them self, to David Suarez for test rebuilds, to our NMU machine gun Gregor Herrmann, to the kind people of HP organized by Martin Michlmayer, and anybody else helping with these fixes," wrote Debian's Matthias Klose.

Before you get too excited, you should know that regular users won't really feel any difference and this is pretty much something that only concerns developers, and nothing more.