Hello Peter,
Is there anything we can do that will minimise the amount of work needed when the next release of GCC emerges ?
Basically just keep the patches up to date. With each release, the major releases (4.x or X.x) will need the most testing, while the minor releases (4.2.x) will need little work. Once the patch for the current version is deemed working, it should not be very hard to get it to work on the next major release, maybe a couple weeks work.
If a lot of RPMs are to be updated with GCC 4 should they be on a separate Sparemint page or is this not necessary ? What I mean is, if a package is updated will it be ok to install with older stuff.
Yes, in most cases. For the end user who doe not do development, if packages need rebuilding, it will have no affect. The problem comes in with users doing development work. If there is a problem with using older libraries with the newer GCC, all of the 'devel' packages will need to be rebuilt. For user applications, such as Lynx, what compiler they were built with will have no affect on the system as a whole. All mint binaries are static, which means the libraries they depend upon are built into the binary itself. So, a binary package could benefit from an upgrade for speed, or to get to a more recent version, it would not be required.
Keith