GCC 14.1 released

I expect some 200 or 300 build failures to remain in Fedora. We didn't originally plan to do all the int-conversion and incompatible-pointer-types cleanups (and return-mismatch didn't even exist yet), but feedback at GNU Tools Cauldron and elsewhere was that we shouldn't do this piecemeal. That left us a bit in a bind from a Fedora perspective. I think we managed to get it down quite close to the usual failure level if you do mass rebuilds every six months (just due to rebuilds picking up incompatible new development in the rest of the distribution).

Towards the release, it became increasingly unclear if a build failure was a Modern C problem, or something else. For example, removing a function declaration from an installed header file used to be a mostly source-compatible change (but not necessarily ABI-compatible if the function returned a double or a pointer). Likewise adding a new argument to a callback function was de-facto source-compatible (and probably ABI-compatible on our targets). Now these result in compilation failures. If I recall correctly, libxml2 2.12 had quite a few changes like that. Are the fixes required work items for the libxml2 2.12 transition, or are they part of the GCC 14 cleanups?

Even before all the fixes, the failure rate wasn't that alarming from a distribution perspective. (As I mentioned, things break all the time, so you fix them and move on.) The more significant concern was that people who start using GCC 14 would no longer be able to build a fair number of generally well-maintained upstream projects. That's why we put so much effort into upstreaming our patches.