GNU Compiler Collection 7 Now openSUSE Tumbleweed Default

The default compiler for openSUSE Tumbleweed became GNU Compiler Collection 7 after the release of snapshot 20170529 making openSUSE the first major distribution to have the new compiler by default.

While Tumbleweed still has GCC6, GCC7 is now the standard for completing executable binaries for the chameleon’s rolling distribution and the change momentarily slowed down the rapid release cycle of Tumbleweed.

“A major update like GCC always take a lot of preparation time and, as it shows in this case, even then some things can slip through,” wrote Dominique Leuenberger is an email to the [openSUSE Factory Mailing List](https://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-factory/), which people who use openSUSE Tumbleweed should subscribe. Luckily, no damage was done to any system in the wild yet.”

The snapshot did expose a graphical glitch with Mozilla Thunderbird has since been fixed.

GCC 7 contains a number of enhancements that help detect buffer overflow and other forms of invalid memory accesses, according to its change log. Position Independent Executables was also enabled by default together with the switch to GCC7.

Snapshot 20170529 also brought a major version change to mono-core (version 5.0), which is an open source, cross platform .NET framework based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime. Another major version change was made to xfce4-panel-plugin-mount, which updated from version 0.6.4 to version 1.1.2; the newer version offers various bugfixes, feature enhancements and port to GTK3. Two other major version changes also came in the snapshot with icu 59.1 and the advanced power management tool tlp 1.0.

Some noticeably important packages updated in the repositories for the snapshot were xfwm4 4.12.4, which fixed rendering with 30-bit colormap and compiler warnings.

Three previous snapshots were releases since we left off with the 2017016 snapshot.

Snapshot 20170524 continued where  2017016 left off by updating KDE Applications to 17.04.1. Perl’s updated to version 5.24.1 fix building with zlib-1.2.10, which had it’s 1.2.11 version updated in the 20170524 snapshot.

Package updates for KDE Applications usually take two in snapshot  to completely update and snapshot 20170522 started the version update. Besides version 17.04.1 that came in that snapshot, ucode-intel moved to version 20170511 and xfce4-terminal updated to 0.8.5 and gives users the option for a customizable size for the terminal.

Snapshot 20170521 focused more on GNOME changes as it transitioned to version 3.24.2. Several core and app modules were updated in the version. The 20170521 snapshot also updated the Linux Kernel to version 4.11.1, LibreOffice to version 5.3.3.2, and both Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird offered security fixes with a version update to 52.1.1.