Re: gcc for winders

[Phil Edwards <pedwards at disaster dot jaj dot com>]

On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 02:11:02PM -0800, Joe Buck wrote:
> 
> > But... it's arguable that people "who don't feel comfortable with building
> > code from source" are at the wrong place entirely, since that's the whole
> > point of a compiler.  :-)
> 
> Well, there's a difference in scale between a small project and a large one.

Here's 90-odd percent of the users:

- Some random utility from sourceforge.net written by a college freshman:

    gunzip -c .... | tar xvf -
    cd .... ; ./configure && make all install

- GCC:

    gunzip -c .... | tar xvf -
    cd .... ; ./configure && make bootstrap install

And many would even get away with 'all' instead of 'bootstrap'.  (Mmm,
well, modulo the blddir==srcdir thing, and that's not hard to explain.)

It's the other 10 percent of the cases, like cross-compiling, that point
up the differences in scale.  But those users are assumed to have a better
idea of what's going on.

DaveK argues that we should point towards source for ethical reasons, and
while I don't disagree with him, I think pointing more towards source should
be encouraged because -- given the existence of a bootstrapping compiler,
and half a metric buttload of free diskspace -- building GCC for a native
compiler just isn't that hard.  I was doing it as a college freshman.


> And they are likely to arrive anyway.  They hear about gcc and want to get it,
> fire up google, go to the top gcc site, see a link called "download", and
> click it.  We need to redirect such folks more firmly to other sites.

All true.

Phil

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devphil at several other less interesting addresses in various dot domains
The gods do not protect fools.  Fools are protected by more capable fools.