Auto-stuff in GCC

[Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis at gmx dot net>]

Hi, I was planning to include this in my final report, but it turned out 
big enough as a rant to send it separately.

About my patch at [1], since I was using strnlen() in one of my dwarf2out 
patches I had to also make sure configure tested for its availability, and 
also provide it in libiberty for targets missing it. This process proved 
way more tedious than it ought to be, and even after completing it there 
were some licensing issues because of GPL incompatibilities since I 
borrowed code from gnulib. I /think/ the discussion ended up proving there 
are no issues, so I'll try pushing the patch again.

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2012-08/msg00333.html

It is a pity however to have such issues in-between GPL programs. IMHO it
would be awesome if all the necessary bits from gnulib were included to
GCC, so we could use all the automatic auto* tools that help with
multi-platform development.

Moreover, while messing with the auto-stuff in GCC I also made an attempt 
to enable AM_SILENT_RULES in automake. But it seems each directory is 
configured in a different manner, and I think automake is not even used in 
most. I'm sure I haven't understood the architecture of GCC's autotools 
stack, so I'd appreciate pointers to any documentation describing it, or 
mentioning things that should be cleaned up. I wanted to make even more 
changes for cleaning up the build process, but I have to figure it out at 
first.


Thanks,
Dimitris