Re: Patch for PR target/12098 (IA64 HP-UX GCC requires GNU as)

["John David Anglin" <dave at hiauly1 dot hia dot nrc dot ca>]

> I am somewhat inclined to extend this to the hppa*-*-hpux* platforms as
> well, those targets can be built using the HP assembler but you can't
> get debug info unless you use GAS.  This is PR target/9468.  Dave, do
> you have an opinion on adding a GAS requirement to the hppa targets?

>From a configuration management standpoint, I agree.  I haven't tried
to do a build using the HP assembler for some time.  Have you tried
using the HP assembler recently?

As you note, GCC doesn't know how to generated debug information that
the HP assembler can handle.  That won't happen since the HP debug format
is proprietary.  PR 9468 isn't really relevant.  I believe we could
add sections for DWARF2 debugging info using GAS, and work around the
fact that we don't support named sections.  Named sections were
removed because of a linker issue.

The HP assembler doesn't support secondary definition symbols or
COMDAT subspaces, so C++ is crippled.  3.3 was really broken in this
regard.

At one time, it was hard to build the 64-bit hppa compiler.   One
option was to build GCC first and then binutils.  This required
using the HP assembler.  However, I added changes to binutils to
allow it to build with the HP bundled compiler.  I'm not sure this
still works without a bit of hacking, but it provides a build route
for someone starting from scratch.  It's also possible to start
with an earlier version of GCC using the HP bundled compiler.

It makes sense to extend the requirement.

Dave
-- 
J. David Anglin                                  dave.anglin@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
National Research Council of Canada              (613) 990-0752 (FAX: 952-6602)