From: "Laurynas Biveinis" <lauras AT softhome DOT net>
Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 22:03:50 +0200
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, jonathan bailey <jbailey8 AT triad DOT rr DOT com>
Subject: Re: Compile gcc 3.0
Message-ID: <20010624220350.A229@lauras.lt>
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> If the GCC's front-ends are written using C extensions that might not be 
> supported by older versions of GCC, then my advice is indeed wrong.  But 
> why would GCC maintainers do such a grave mistake?  

IMHO this is not a grave mistake. If they require users to bootstrap, that's
fine.

> It's perfectly clear 
> that strict ANSI C cannot be used, but using extensions supported only 
> by the latest version is a far cry from that.  Doing so narrows the range 
> of possible systems which can build GCC, without any good reason, 

Not at all - one just has to build C compiler first.

> so it 
> doesn't sound like a good idea to me.

> IIRC, a large portion of GCC bug reports was related to bootstrapping, at 
> least last time I checked.

Surprisingly very few of them turned out to be genuine bugs in GCC. Most
of the time the problem was between keyboard and chair, and wrong auxiliary
programs.

> And, if it's true that the normal build is less tested in the DJGPP 
> configuration, perhaps that ought to change.  Unless GCC really uses the 
> latest extensions, there's no reason why a DJGPP user would need to 
> bootstrap.

As I see it, there's no reason why a DJGPP user would need not to bootstrap -
he gets a better optimized compiler, also user are more likely to avoid bugs
in configures/makefiles. If they want to do plain make, that's fine and it
might work, but things are more likely to break. If GCC developers require
bootstraping, then let's live with it, unless they adopt plain make as well.

Laurynas