On Wed, 18 Feb 2026 at 10:59, Dr. Tobias Quathamer <[email protected]> wrote: > So, if you don't have any objections, I plan to switch the default > golang compiler to 1.26 in the next few days.
It's a tiny bit tangential, so apologies for that, but I think it would probably be prudent to finally do something about gccgo too, while we're opening the hood on src:golang-defaults. For a long time now, gccgo has been stuck at an implementation of Go 1.18, but even then, it's only a *partial* implementation of 1.18 (notably missing generics). As noted and discussed in the CC'd https://bugs.debian.org/961916, bin:gccgo-go's version is misleading at best and actively harmful at worst, because it *looks* like it's 1.24, and this is where I think the overlap with the proposal to update to 1.26 appears - that number drifts even further from any truth. In ideating on solutions, I was thinking about doing something really goofy, like having bin:gccgo-go have a Version: that's 1.18 or something, but that ship has sailed (we can't downgrade in the archive), and it would be really poor behavior for one source package to do that anyhow. So concretely, what I'd propose for src:golang-defaults 1.26+ is that we remove all traces of gccgo entirely instead. This is somewhat disruptive, but I don't think it's unreasonable. Every interesting architecture is currently supported by upstream golang-go, gccgo hasn't been a suitable GOROOT_BOOTSTRAP for Go itself for several versions now, and gccgo is a very outdated implementation. On top of all that, I strongly doubt there are many (if any) meaningful Go packages left in the archive that really successfully build with gccgo. I am going to work on an even more concrete MR for review after sending this email. 🙇 ♥, - Tianon
