"Kaveh R. GHAZI" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Mon, 30 Oct 2006, Geoffrey Keating wrote: > > > 5. Are you aware that the GMP home page says > > > > Note that we chose not to work around all new GCC bugs in this > > release. Never forget to do make check after building the library > > to make likely it was not miscompiled! > > > > and therefore this library needs to be part of the bootstrap, not > > built separately? > > One more thing, I initially went down the road of including the GMP/MPFR > sources in the gcc tree and building them as part of the bootstrap > process. But the consensus was not to do that: > > http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-10/msg00167.html
I'm not sure I entirely agree with Mark's reasoning. It's true that we've always required a big set of tools to do development with gcc. And it's true that we require GNU make to be installed and working in order to build gcc. But this is the first time that we've ever required a non-standard library to be installed before J. Random User can build gcc. And plenty of people do try to build gcc themselves, as can be seen on gcc-help. If we are going to require these libraries, and we are not going to include them directly in the gcc sources, then I think it is incumbent on us to make the build procedure much much smarter. For example, if sufficiently new versions of the libraries can not be found, then perhaps the build procedure should actually download the versions from a known good site (e.g., gcc.gnu.org), unpack them, and build them. I don't care whether this is done at configure time or make time. If the code can not be downloaded, then I think the build procedure needs to give an extensive and clear error message which includes a description of where the sources can be found, how to build them, and how to run configure correctly. I think that if we stick with our current approach, we will have a lot of bug reports and dissatisfied users when gcc 4.3 is released. Ian
