On Wed, 14 Jul 2021 at 14:55, Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

At the very least the GCC variable is well used in other layers as it is hard to
remember all the different bits of gcc that are listed here so I think that
should stay. Some of these can probably be removed but I'm not sure how far
we could/should go. glibc's list of recipes isn't trivial either...

I used layerindex to check. Alternative gcc versions are provided by multiple layers (mostly arm-related), but an alternative older glibc is only in meta-debian and that is using neither PREFERRED_VERSION directly nor the *LIBCVERSION convenience (so not sure how it's meant to be used). I will send a v2 with gcc added back.

Anyone else should probably just copy the PREFERRED_VERSION lines for what they want to adjust into the layers directly. But let's see what Khem says - I do think getting help from AUH/devtool in doing the updates fully, or at least using 'devtool upgrade' locally to prepare the git trees for manual patch rebasing is valuable.

Alex