I also spent quite a lot of time working on GCC 4.2 during the hackathon. Having fast build machines helped a lot.
According to robert@, it seems that some issue were fixed in GCC on some architectures after 3.3, and so that a recent GCC is a prerequisite for porting openoffice to amd64. So, we now have a gcc 4.2 port that compiles and runs on i386, amd64, and sparc64. Most of the time was spent coercing libtool into grabbing the right libgcc, since it insisted on grabbing the non-pic one, which does not work on amd64. An amd64 port of openoffice is still some ways off, as the bundled stlports does not agree at all with GCC 4.2. But still, this is progress...
