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Comment by Aissen | Hacker News Reader

It was the development version.

See "Version Numbering Scheme for GCC 5 and Up" here https://gcc.gnu.org/develop.html .

I'm still confused after reading this. Does this mean that 6.0, 6.1.1, 6.2.1 etc. do not actually name specific code bases that can be downloaded? Or is 6.0 the name of a specific commit in the code?

You can download snapshots of 6.0 e.g. here: ftp://gd.tuwien.ac.at/gnu/gcc/snapshots/

Between GCC 4.9 and GCC 5, they made basically the same change Linux made between 2.6.39 and 3.0: they dropped one of the components in the version number. The amount of change between GCC 5, 6, 7, etc. are equivalent to the amount of change between 4.7, 4.8, 4.9, etc.

They're also using the version 0 in the second component to indicate prereleases. GCC 6.0.0 was the development version of GCC 6. The release candidate was 6.0.1. The first release of GCC 6, which came out today, is 6.1.0. Then there will be development under the name 6.1.1, and the first bugfix release on the GCC 6 line will be 6.2.0. The amount of change between 6.1.0 and 6.2.0 is equivalent to the amount of change between 4.9.0 and 4.9.1 in the old numbering scheme.

Thanks for the explanation. I realize this is bikeshedding, but is there a rationale behind using 6.0.1 as a release candidate? I get making major versions less rare, but not sure I get he rest of it.

Ah, thanks for the link. I was wondering because Arch Linux is still on GCC 5.3, yet the release mail says that "the last release" (which I considered to be 6.0) to be about a year old.

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