A few Gentoo users got bit by that by trying out the gold linker. When you end up with a 64bit linker that dumps core when linking something major, like gcc, you have a somewhat usable but ultimately badly broken system.
So yeah, infrastructure upgrades like bash, glibc, gcc, binutils, python make us all _very very_ concerned. It may not be noticable at first, but if it causes bad code generation or breaks on non-trivial things, you end up with a nightmare to recover.
Posted Dec 4, 2010 19:38 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
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Indeed Fedora just got hit with a mass rebuild due to just such a codegen bug in GCC's 4.5 branch (never released, but Fedora update periodically to tip-of-branch rather than using releases, so they were hit, and had to rebuild everything built with the buggy compiler).