I *suppose* you could include other parts of the toolchain in the "bootstrap",
but I think the advantages of doing so are pretty small.
What about libraries used by GCC? From the user point of view it is a
bad bug that you cannot bootstrap a 64-bit compiler starting from a
32-bit one (because stage2 does not find a 64-bit libiberty to use).
I would never use "../configure --disable-bootstrap && make bootstrap", but I
most certainly *would* use "../configure --disable-bootstrap; cd gcc; make
bootstrap" and would be *very* annoyed if it stoped working.
Except that the two are synonyms.
In a previous message, you suggested having two trees, one with and one
without --disable-bootstrap, but that means doing *two* sets of compilations.
I have a fast enough machine and enough disk space that it's not *too*
painful (though it is a nuisance and takes time), but you have to be
conscious of the GCC developers who have slow machines (or people doing
builds on slow targets!) and ensure that whatever "improvements" are done,
that they still have some mechanism to do things the old way.
Since then, I've catered for the needs of people that saw their workflow
broken and reported that. Now (with patches posted but not yet
reviewed), you can comfortably work with a single tree, use most of the
commands that you used to have, and still have the advantage of broader
coverage of the compiler and no binary compatibility problems between
GCC and the host compiler. Except "cd gcc; make bootstrap" because the
two methods *cannot* live together in the same tree.
Paolo
