This is an early PSA that we’re planning to remove the -cxx03, -libgfortran3, -libgfortran4 ABIs from the default list of built ABIs on Yggdrasil. The binaries provided by julialang.org are -libgfortran5-cxx11, so are unaffected. Source builds may be affected if you are using a particularly old Linux distribution. To our knowledge, the only major distribution still in use that fit these criteria was RHEL 7, which reached its End-Of-Maintenance date on June 30, 2024 (i.e. more than a year ago). While we do not specifically tie our platform supports to OS vendor timelines, it’s useful as a guiding line. RHEL 8 and most other up to date distributions are -libgfortran5-cxx11.
The impact of this change will be gradual in that new JLLs will no longer be available for the platform. However, existing JLLs will continue to be available and working of course.
You can check the ABI of your local julia install like so:
julia> Base.BinaryPlatforms.host_triplet()
"x86_64-linux-gnu-libgfortran5-cxx11-julia_version+1.13.0"
If anyone has concerns (with compelling reasons), we may consider a stay of execution on this change as everything is largely automated, but building all these ABIs does consume significant CI cycles (and package server storage space, bandwidth, etc). We’d like to free some of that up in anticipating of some upcoming new ABI variants.