Re: A completely different approach to EH runtime

[Alexandre Oliva <aoliva at redhat dot com>]

On Feb 21, 2001, "H . J . Lu" <hjl@valinux.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Feb 21, 2001 at 07:40:27PM -0300, Alexandre Oliva wrote:

>> I'd advise people to install other versions of GCC in other
>> directories.  I suppose they won't be building programs used during
>> start-up with this new version of GCC.

> Do you think it will encourage Linux people to try new gcc?

It won't be a problem, as long as they don't replace start-up
programs.  Why did you choose to skip that part of the argument?

>> Probably not.  And this won't be necessary as long as GCC arranges for
>> programs built with it to search for libgcc_s.so in its installation
>> directory.  However, if GCC doesn't do that, and the user adds the new
>> GCC's libdir to ld.so.conf, then all existing programs may be
>> affected.  This is probably not advisable.  Unless /lib searched
>> before any directory listed in ld.so.conf, LD_LIBRARY_PATH or DT_RPATH
>> (sp?), in which case there's just no way to test a new libgcc_s.so
>> without replacing the system's version.  That would be a problem.

> Glad to hear you are starting to see the problem :-).  It is no different
> form the normal glibc upgrade problem.

IMO, it is radically different, unless you use GCC to build system
programs, and replace their original versions with the ones you've
built with this new GCC.  Joe Hacker won't do that.

Can't one install glibc in a separate directory and use it only for a
few programs?  That's just the same as installing GCC in a separate
directory, and arranging for libgcc_so to be used only with the
programs built with that particular GCC.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  aoliva@{cygnus.com, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me