I well aware of this trouble, but still ardour is a nice audio application. Others like muse are better compatible with gcc but fail on other rough edges. I don't like to kick ardour from the repos, since development happens in a rather fast speed.
Anyway, I always like to hear suggestions how ardour can be improved in ArchLinux.

Arch Linux absolutely needs branches of GCC to be present. There are many hundreds of applications that do not work on various versions of GCC. Debian, for example, understands this. You can concurrently install several versions of GCC on Debian, and specify which to use with your CC environment variable. Also, the removal of the previous version of libstdc++ breaks some apps already in Arch Linux, and breaks tons more non-Arch Linux specific apps such as commercial video games.

Compile Ardour with GCC 3.x.x and there are no problems ...

Well, it's not a question about to "understand" that we need more gcc branches, Archlinux is just not debian. Keeping several branches of fully working gcc is a mess.
I will keep it the way it is for several reasons:
- it doesnt crash for me when I close a session
- the only way I can produce a crash is to slide am empty session to the
farest right position which isn't an gcc issue I think
- it improves fastely
- meanwhile muse has made it's way to the repos for people who really can't work with ardour

Re-opened by request from Raven Morris

fwiw, Ardour works fine for me here as well. Used to segfault on close, but hasn't in the last few point releases.

Just a comment; I set this bug to waiting for feedback. Because:
- ArchLinux prolly won't support multiple gcc brancches for software (keep it KISS)
- newer releases of ardour run definately better than ardour versions at the time when this bugreport was created
- what do you want to be done with ardour? Not offending, this is a serious request!

When I submitted this bug report (quite a while ago now), I had done so as a direct result of discussing the matter with the Ardour developers. At that time, there was absolutely no support for GCC 3.4.x/LibStdC++, and that there were many issues with it.

Apparently since that time they have done a lot of work on supporting the newer GCC/LibStdC++, as the issues I had found are no longer there.

I only requested a reopening of this bug because the bug tracker does not let you post a comment unless it is open (d'oh). Is there any way to allow comments to be added to closed bugs, so people can send a message to whoever the bug was assigned to ?

Feel free to close it again now, heh.

But regarding the branches of GCC, I firmly stand behind what I said. It is a real issue not having anything but a bleeding edge compiler version available, which will simply *not compile* thousands of pieces of source code available out there in the GNU/Linux/X11/UNIX realm. GCC 2.9, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 have all changed a substantial amount of the inside of how GCC processes things (though 3.0 and 3.1 were rather buggy branches). It is not that hard to support more than one branch. I am not asking for anything more than installing the older ones to a separate prefix, e.g. /opt/gcc/3.3. It supports configure options to add a suffix or prefix to all filenames, so it's very easy to have it end up with files named like gcc-3.3, so there is no interference with the current release at all.

It would not be making Arch Linux "far more complicated" or anything like that, but would save anyone having compile problems a bunch of time to compile a copy of GCC to compile whatever it is that they're working on. I had previously been pacman -U my gcc-3.3 package whenever I needed it, but for some unknown reason my package cache (5GB worth) just disappeared one day. I didn't do any cache clear command to pacman, so I've no idea why it vanished, argh. And because Arch Linux has no old versions of packages on their servers, I'm SOL.

Also what I said above:

"The removal of the previous version of libstdc++ breaks some apps already in Arch Linux, and breaks tons more non-Arch Linux specific apps such as commercial video games."

How many of you developers have a libstdc++.so.5 in one of your shared library directories ? My guess is most if not all of you have one. I know at least two of the developers do. Yet for the general public, it simply doesn't exist in Arch Linux. Once you upgrade to GCC 3.4.x, the previous libstdc++.so.5 is deleted from the system, breaking things as it departs.

pacman -Qo /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5
/usr/lib/libstdc++.so.5 is owned by gcc 3.4.3-2

Well, apparently this bug was fixed somewhere along the line (though no mention of that above on this bug report). So I guess you can disregard this comment. *Goes to look at the PKGBUILD* Ah, yeah. You download and compile part of GCC 3.3.5, to get the prior libstdc++ library.

OK, as a final comment:
1. Archlinux is not going to support multiple compiler anytime soon. This issue has been discussed several times among the devs and it has been decided to keep it simple.
2. libstdc++.so.5 is part of gcc-3.4 in Archlinux and has been for a long time. It is mainly in the repos for packages that don't compile with gcc-3.4 and thus will have to rely on the old lib. eg, fluxbox is such a package and it will be kicked from the repos when there is an urgent need to rebuild it. There prolly won't happen such things as rebuilding gcc3.3 for that.
3. Having it bleeding edge surely has it's shortcomings, but it also the advantage that it keeps the development running. Providing latest software has been a goal in ArchLinux for a long time.