And I expect that 1.78 will be another significant effort that won't land before the year after?
Yes, even though it will be easier once the foundations are laid off, I wouldn't expect 1.78 before at least a year after that.
For my own understanding: is this something that the Git project would have to support or something that the distributor needs to set up?
I would say it is something the distributor needs to set up. From what I remember rustc requires a flag with the path to the rustc_codegen_gcc backend. This means that has long as the distributor has the alternative backend and a way to inject a flag to rustc through an environment variable it should be mostly fine for them.
Pierre-Emmanuel
