Le Tue, Dec 05, 2006 at 07:12:08AM -0500, Diego Novillo écrivait/wrote: > Kaveh R. GHAZI wrote on 12/04/06 21:32:
> >That idea got nixed, but I think it's time to revisit it. Paolo has > >worked out the kinks in the configury and we should apply his patch and > >import the gmp/mpfr sources, IMHO. > Yes, I vote to include gmp/mpfr in the tree. If gmp/mpfr is still a > fluid target, we could add svn glue code to avoid commits to the > sub-tree and rely exclusively on wholesale import. I'm not sure to follow Diego and I am a bit concerned about other potential external libraries. Suppose for example that some GCC code uses an external library like the Parma Polyedral Library http://www.cs.unipr.it/ppl/ (which is very useful for sophisticated static analysis) or the Libtool Dynamic Loader, which might be useful also, for example if the compiler needs to generate some specialized (w.r.t. to the compiled source code) code. Maybe my position is unusual, but I believe that more and more external libraries or softwares will become required or useful to GCC. More generally, I believe that some kind of compilations (ie some specialized passes or frontends ...) would more and more need external libraries. And I do not understand the need to incorporate the source code of these libraries into GCC Subversion tree. This argument already stands for Binutils or bison and could even stand for Boehm's GC or perhaps SubVersion or bash or GNU make .... I really tend to believe that the configure machinery should permit external libraries (and I welcome the --with-gmp-lib & --with-gmp-include configure flags) and check for required versions, but I have trouble to understand why should these libraries be included into GCC (source tree, as managed by SubVersion in the trunk). So my current opinion is still that the GMP & MPFR source should stay away of GCC (but that the configure script should check for their installed versions). The only case where this could be invalid is when GCC would requires a slightly patched GMP or MPFR (ie if the upstrream authors of these GMP/MPFR/.. libraries refused to incorporate some required patch). This in practice would mean a fork of these external libraries, which we should try to avoid. As a sidenote, I would believe that most GCC users (not contributors!) do not compile the GCC source code, but usually use the compiler that some (e.g.) Linux distribution (or other build) offers them. Then the effort cost for building GCC is on the distributions maintainers, not on GCC users. -- Basile STARYNKEVITCH http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/ email: basile<at>starynkevitch<dot>net mobile: +33 6 8501 2359 8, rue de la Faïencerie, 92340 Bourg La Reine, France *** opinions {are only mines, sont seulement les miennes} ***
