Re: build failure, GMP not available

[Mark Mitchell <mark at codesourcery dot com>]

Ian Lance Taylor wrote:

> I'm not sure I entirely agree with Mark's reasoning.  It's true that
> we've always required a big set of tools to do development with gcc.
> And it's true that we require GNU make to be installed and working in
> order to build gcc.  But this is the first time that we've ever
> required a non-standard library to be installed before J. Random User
> can build gcc.  And plenty of people do try to build gcc themselves,
> as can be seen on gcc-help.

I don't believe there's a serious problem with the concept, as long as 
"./configure; make; make install" for GMP DTRT.  If you can do it for 
GCC, you can do it for a library it uses too.

I would strongly oppose downloading stuff during the build process. 
We're not in the apt-get business; we can leave that to the GNU/Linux 
distributions, the Cygwin distributors, etc.  If you want to build a KDE 
application, you have to first build/download the KDE libraries; why 
should GCC be different?

> I think that if we stick with our current approach, we will have a lot
> of bug reports and dissatisfied users when gcc 4.3 is released.

I'd argue that the minority of people who are building from source 
should not be our primary concern.  Obviously, all other things being 
equal, we should try to make that easy -- but if we can deliver a better 
compiler (as Kaveh has already shown we can with his patch series), then 
we should prioritize that.  For those that want to build from source, we 
should provide good documentation, and clear instructions as to where to 
find what they need, but we should assume they can follow complicated 
instructions -- since the process is already complicated.

I do think it's important that we make sure there's a readily buildable 
GMP available, including one that works on OS X, in time for 4.3.  We 
should provide a tarball for it from gcc.gnu.org, if there isn't a 
suitable GMP release by then.

--
Mark Mitchell
CodeSourcery
mark@codesourcery.com
(650) 331-3385 x713