Main concern is that when I try CentOS I see that GCC is out of date. Is there a distro that is geared towards developers?
+5
A:
Generally, develop on what you'll deploy on. If you need to run your code on e.g. RHEL, it might cost you a lot of time if you develop on a recent Ubuntu/Fedora machine (older Python version, different version of libpcap, initscripts not working, just to mention a few time-wasters when we went that route and were oblivious to what we needed to deploy on)
If that isn't your concern, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian - or really, any recent distro with a fairly big community will do fine.
(also, gcc on Centos5 isn't out of date, it works quite well - and if absolutly needed you can compile/install the current gcc release from source)
nos
2010-10-02 01:04:57
I was advised not to try to update CentOS' version of GCC. Maybe that was bad advice.
TallPines
2010-10-02 03:20:45
Install a new version in parallell (e.g. somewhere under /opt). You should indeed not update/replace the stock gcc in CentOS.
nos
2010-10-02 08:10:47
What is the rational for not replacing stock gcc on CentOS?
fpmurphy
2010-10-02 16:42:51
@fpmurphy: The stuff that's built for a given release of a given distro sometimes assumes certain things about the compiler that was used to build it, or assumes that other apps (and kernels!) on that system were compiled the same way. There are times that changing the compiler changes how the source code gets interpreted, or just barely changes how stuff gets linked, and can cause very strange and subtle bugs to appear.
cHao
2010-10-02 20:32:41
The compiler included with the distro is pretty much guaranteed to work fine with all the important stuff in that distro. Earlier or later versions, not so much. So the distro's compiler should be the one used if any system stuff ever needs to be rebuilt. Unless of course you want to ditch RPM and manage half the distro by hand...which i wouldn't.
cHao
2010-10-02 20:39:59