RE: Building mainline and 4.2 on Debian/amd64

["Meissner, Michael" <michael dot meissner at amd dot com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org [mailto:gcc-owner@gcc.gnu.org] On Behalf
Of
> Joe Buck
> Sent: Monday, March 19, 2007 2:02 PM
> To: Andrew Pinski
> Cc: Florian Weimer; Steven Bosscher; gcc@gcc.gnu.org
> Subject: Re: Building mainline and 4.2 on Debian/amd64
> 
> On Mon, Mar 19, 2007 at 10:35:15AM -0700, Andrew Pinski wrote:
> > On 3/19/07, Joe Buck <Joe.Buck@synopsys.com> wrote:
> > >This brings up a point: the build procedure doesn't work by default
on
> > >Debian-like amd64 distros, because they lack 32-bit support (which
is
> > >present on Red Hat/Fedora/SuSE/etc distros).  Ideally this would be
> > >detected when configuring.
> >
> > Actually it brings up an even more important thing, distros that
don't
> > include a 32bit user land is really just broken.  Why do these
distros
> > even try to get away with this, they are useless to 99.9% of the
> > people and for the 0.1% of the people who find them interesting,
they
> > can just compile with --disable-multilib.
> 
> Unfortunately, such distros are in common use, and the GCC project
jumps
> through hoops to support many things that get far less use.
> 
> A platform that contains only 64-bit libraries is fundamentally a
> different platform than one that has both 32- and 64-.  Ideally there
> would be a different target triplet for such platforms.  Maybe
> x86_64only?  But that would have to be handled upstream.
> 
> In the meantime, the installation instructions should tell people to
> use --disable-multilib.

For a hosted configuration, we probably have the configuration support
determine if both 32 and 64 bit libraries are installed by trying to
compile a program with -m32.