Ian Lance Taylor wrote:
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.
I don't believe there's a serious problem with the concept, as long as "./configure; make; make install" for GMP DTRT. If you can do it for GCC, you can do it for a library it uses too.
I would strongly oppose downloading stuff during the build process. We're not in the apt-get business; we can leave that to the GNU/Linux distributions, the Cygwin distributors, etc. If you want to build a KDE application, you have to first build/download the KDE libraries; why should GCC be different?
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.
I'd argue that the minority of people who are building from source should not be our primary concern. Obviously, all other things being equal, we should try to make that easy -- but if we can deliver a better compiler (as Kaveh has already shown we can with his patch series), then we should prioritize that. For those that want to build from source, we should provide good documentation, and clear instructions as to where to find what they need, but we should assume they can follow complicated instructions -- since the process is already complicated.
I do think it's important that we make sure there's a readily buildable GMP available, including one that works on OS X, in time for 4.3. We should provide a tarball for it from gcc.gnu.org, if there isn't a suitable GMP release by then.
-- Mark Mitchell CodeSourcery [EMAIL PROTECTED] (650) 331-3385 x713
