Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 16:11:09 +0300 (IDT) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Laurynas Biveinis cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, jonathan bailey Subject: Re: Compile gcc 3.0 In-Reply-To: <20010624145323.A211@lauras.lt> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com Errors-To: nobody AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk On Sun, 24 Jun 2001, Laurynas Biveinis wrote: > > I agree that "make bootstrap" should work, but it involves additional > > complications, so if you just want to build GCC with minimal fuss, you > > may wish to avoid bootstraping. > > Eli, IMHO this is a wrong advise. The one and only supported way > for ordinary user to build a native compile is `make bootstrap'. Plain > make _might_ work, but if it doesn't, there's noone to blame. I understand > that bootstrapping takes longer and uses more disk space, but it gets > much more tested than ordinary `make'. So it's the way with minimal fuss. > Please note that language frontends other than C are not written in portable > C - they use GNU C, and might use features found only in the same version > of compiler. In other words, building of GCC 3.0 with 2.95 or earlier > might fail in C++ frontend and the like. 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? 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, 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. 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.