Re: primitive questions

["Martin v. Loewis" <martin at loewis dot home dot cs dot tu-berlin dot de>]

>       i. is re-running the `configure' script required each time?
> 
>      ii. does the developer perform the three-stage build of gcc?
>          (this would seem a bit drastic especially if one has a slower
>          development box. so I assume there is a different make-target
>          used for development other than `make bootstrap'.)

It depends what you want to do. If you just want to test your source,
you can go into the toplevel gcc build directory (i.e. the one having
a gcc subdirectory), and invoke make without targets. This will re-run
configure in subdirectories if one of the configure scripts has
changed, and it will rebuild those parts that have changed (or have
some of their dependencies changed). In this case, the host compiler
will be used for the rebuild.

Before you submit an actual patch, it is required that you check it
with a full bootstrap, to see whether the modified gcc can build
itself. It is also advised to run the testsuite, at least for the
parts that you changed.

> Any pointers to documents available on-line regarding these issues
> would be most appreciated.

The readership of such documents would be quite narrow, so there are
no documents describing that in the level of detail you need. Of
course, when you are more involved and still remember your first
steps, feel free to contribute some text :-)

> p.s., I hope my questions were not too 'silly' to be asked on this list.

Not at all. Please note that this is quite specific to gcc; I could
not guarantee that it works the same way in libgcj - it all depends on
the dependencies being right in the makefiles (which, of course, I'd
expect to be the case for libgcj).

Regards,
Martin