Contributed by weerd on 2010-05-27 from the bigger-binaries dept.

Recently, there has been a lot of work going into the tree to move some architectures to GCC4 (the latest non-GPL3 version). Those of you following source-changes@ and/or ports-changes@ will have seen the large amount of commits to prepare for this new compiler. Just today, Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) committed the bits to switch the amd64 and sparc64 architectures over to GCC4.

For the people following -current, please be advised that this is a flag day, you will need to follow the steps in the faq to upgrade your machine. There was another one about config(8) needing an update very recently and soon more architectures will follow amd64 and sparc64, so keep a close eye on that page if you're on an architecture that hasn't moved yet.

In addtion to the move to GCC4, FORTRAN f77 is moving out of the src tree into the ports tree. Some of the reasons were stated by Marc Espie (espie@) on the ports@ mailing list.

Update: Marco Peereboom requests more people help test the move to GCC4. Interested people should check out his website where he collects results and which describes the testing procedure. If you want to send him your results, send them to marco@openbsd.org.