From: Andrew Crabtree <andrewc AT typhoon DOT rose DOT hp DOT com>
Message-Id: <199706151714.AA049164840@typhoon.rose.hp.com>
Subject: Re: PGCC dependability?
To: sar AT maties DOT sun DOT ac DOT za
Date: Sun, 15 Jun 1997 10:14:00 PDT
Cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
In-Reply-To: <33A3E85A.1291@maties.sun.ac.za>; from "sar@maties.sun.ac.za" at Jun 15, 97 6:04 am
Precedence: bulk

> 
> I am wondering if anyone has been using PGCC for a while.
Me, obviously :)

> The PCG warns
> that some bugs may have been introduced in GCC when they did the
> recompile for PGCC.
This isn't exactly what they warn.  What they say is that any bugs 
in GCC will be picked up by PGCC.  See, the PGCC patches are not taken
from a fixed branch of the gcc source tree (like 2.7.2.2 say), but
are instead taken versus the development snapshots on the 2.7.2 branch,
which is constrantly being updated.  For instance, gcc snapshots 
from ~ February to May were broken in go32.h so you couldn't 
even build DJGPP from it.  So, when you get pgcc snapshot 0522, what 
you are getting is the gcc working branch snapshot from 0522, which is 
then patched by pcg folks.

> Has anyone encountered any problems?
Everything I've seen so far has been configuration problems (by me 
for alignment and stack), or known bugs (see the FAQ for what is known
not to work).  I've seen a couple other posts, but requests for more
info have drawn blanks.

> Is it
> reasonably safe to discard gcc (after backing up of course :) and going
> with the pentium opti gcc.exe?

gcc.exe is not nearly as much a concern as cc1.exe.  I keep a backup copy
(its only about 2MB total), just in case.  Most linux people rebuild 
their entire kernel with pgcc.  On my side, the binaries I provide are
pgcc compiled, and I use a recompiled libc, liballeg, libm, and 
all my programs.  No trouble yet.

Andrew