Re: GCC 3.0 Release Criteria

[David Edelsohn <dje at watson dot ibm dot com>]

	When you propose making libgcc a shared library on many systems,
do you mean GNU/Linux and other open source operating systems, or are you
referring to most commercial operating systems as well?  For an
application linked against a libgcc shared library to be transportable to
other systems, either a copy of the libgcc shared library needs to be
present on those other systems or the application needs to be linked
statically.  If the operating system has its own shared libraries which
will be present on the other systems, statically linking will include the
systems native libraries as well.  Linking all libraries statically can
cause numerous problems -- not just executable size.

	If we cannot get the operating system vendor to ship a shared
library version of libgcc as part of its standard, base application
runtime environment, I do not think that libgcc should be built as a
shared library on that system by default.  Even directing users to public
locations to download the shared library for the particular system is not
enough, IMHO.

	libgcc is a fundamental support library for GCC.  If one is not
linking any other GCC-provided libraries (e.g., libstdc++) as a shared
library, I am concerned about catching a programmer by surprise that
libgcc needs to be installed everywhere or the only other option is static
linking.

	I cannot tell if this sentiment already has been accepted during
the earlier discussions.  

David