On Tue, 2006-10-10 at 04:22, Mark Mitchell wrote: > Kaveh R. GHAZI wrote: > > Has there been any thought to including GMP/MPFR in the GCC repository > > like we do for zlib and intl? > > I do not think we should be including more such packages in the GCC > repository. It's complicated from an FSF perspective and it bloats our > software. GCC is a complicated piece of software, and to build it you > need a lot of stuff installed on your system. I think we should just > accept that. :-) > > I think that making our build system more complicated, and adding more > packages, with the goal of making life simpler for people building from > source is deceptive. It doesn't seem particularly harder to build and > install a few libraries and then install GCC. But, making our build > system more complex gives us more ways to make mistakes. It also tempts > us to add lots of configuration options for in-tree and "system" > versions of the libraries, for building but not installing libraries, etc. > > I do think we should do is provide a known-good version (whether via a > tag in some version control system, or via a tarball) of these libraries > so that people can easily get versions that work. > > (For avoidance of doubt, the above statements are just my opinions as a > GCC developer; they're in no way "official".)
I think there's a very important distinction that needs to be drawn between a tool that needs to be installed to *build* gcc and a tool that needs to be installed in order to *run* gcc. GMP/MPFR is needed for the latter; and to date we have never relied on such an external component that isn't part of the base installation of a system (such as libc). What makes this worse is that a specific version of this package is needed, so this can make upgrading/developing the compiler difficult since other packages may be built and expect older versions. There was major resistance to hard-coding the search path for the shared library into the object file. R.