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Re: Convert 3.2 sources to ISO C90
- From: law at redhat dot com
- To: Joe Buck <Joe dot Buck at synopsys dot com>
- Cc: rra at stanford dot edu (Russ Allbery), gcc at gcc dot gnu dot org
- Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2002 20:03:18 -0600
- Subject: Re: Convert 3.2 sources to ISO C90
- Reply-to: law at redhat dot com
In message <200206052214.PAA04093@atrus.synopsys.com>, Joe Buck writes:
>
> > Maybe I'm not being sufficiently sympathetic to HP-UX users, but as a
> > long-time Solaris user, I have to admit that I don't quite understand the
> > difficulties of downloading a binary version of GCC to use as a bootstrap
> > compiler.
>
> Even for those organizations who are too paranoid to do this, they can
> bootstrap an older GCC and use it to build the newer one.
That doesn't always work with new versions of the OS.
ie, let's pretend we made this change for GCC 3.0 -- then there would be no way
for folks on hpux11 to easily bootstrap. Why? Because 2.95 didn't support
hpux11 and the compiler that comes with hpux11 is non-ANSI and would have
choked. The only way to bootstrap would be via cross compilation -- but
you don't have cross-assembler or cross-linker support for HPUX targets or
by bludgeoning 2.95 source so that it worked on hpux11 -- something *I*
know how to do simply because I'm intimately familiar the internals of hpux
and how they affect GCC but 99.9% of the world does not know how to do.
Effectively we would have made GCC 3.0 unusable for hpux11 for the overwhelming
majority of developers because there would be no reasonable way to get the
compiler built.
I really think we're taking a step backwards if we go this direction.
jeff