How can I get GCC 4.7 installed on Precise?

Question

The latest version of GCC in the Precise archives is 4.6.3. However, GCC 4.7 adds support for some newer C++11 features (like delegating constructors). Quantal's package archives have GCC 4.7.2 available.

Is there any way I can get GCC 4.7 installed on Precise? Better yet, is there an easy way to take a newer version of a package in one release and backport it to an older release?

Answer 1

I have created a PPA that contains a build of GCC 4.7 for Precise here:

ppa:george-edison55/gcc4.7-precise (Click here for instructions on using PPAs.)

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To backport a package from one release to another is a relatively simple process assuming you have a Launchpad account and have registered your GPG key there.

Make sure you have the ubuntu-dev-tools package installed:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-dev-tools

The syntax for running the backport command looks something like this:

backportpackage -s [new_release] -d [old_release] -u [ppa] [package_name]

The command above will backport [package_name] from [new_release] to [old_release]and upload it to [ppa]. Note that in this particular case you will need to backport not only gcc-4.7 but also gcj-4.7 and gcc-defaults in that order.