RFC: requiring GCC >= 4.7 to build glibc

[Florian Weimer]

On 08/20/2015 03:51 PM, Joseph Myers wrote:
> For glibc 2.21 we increased the minimum GCC version for building glibc to 
> 4.6.  There's one major GCC release a year, so the correspondingly old 
> version for glibc 2.23 would be GCC 4.7.  What do people think about 
> increasing the minimum version requirement?

Somewhat related: I find it rather odd that we are very conservative
when it comes to pushing the minimum requirement for GCC, but are very
aggressively requiring newer binutils versions.  As a result, it is
quite difficult to find stock systems which can build glibc and actually
have older GCC versions.

If we bump the GCC version requirement to 4.7 (and not beyond), I plan
to restore binutils 2.22 support on x86_64, so that I can test on Debian
wheezy.  It looks pretty straightforward to do so.

Florian