I want to start playing around with some of the newer C++11 features and it appears that the best support for this is with gcc 4.8, and Squeeze ships with 4.4.5.
However, I don't want to cause any "damage" to my current setup. What's the best way to get both versions of gcc running side-by-side? I'm concerned mostly at the large number of dependencies and that taking them all in to my current system may render it unstable.
Has anyone managed to do this, and what are the steps involved?
Failing that, I'll probably just create a VM and run an "unstable" Debian under that but it's a less-than-ideal solution.
Answer
If you install GCC from source just make sure you don't install it to /usr and it won't mess anything up. If you install it as your own user, not root, then there is zero chance of messing up the system.
See http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/InstallingGCC for the almost-idiot-proof minimal configuration.
I have various versions built as my user and installed in ~/gcc/4.X for various X.
The only thing to be aware of using that set up is that the shared libraries for the new version aren't in the dynamic linker's default search path, so you need to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH or some other solution to ensure executables find the libs from 4.8, see the libstdc++ FAQ and the page it links to in the manual
I use a wrapper script call g++11 which simply calls the new version of GCC with -std=gnu++11 and passes a flag to the linker telling it to set the path to the 4.8 libs in the executable:
$HOME/gcc/4.8/bin/g++ -Wl,-rpath,$HOME/gcc/4.8/lib64 -std=gnu++11 -Wall -Wextra -g "$@"