Re: Unclear documentation on building GCC together with binutils

[Brian Dessent <brian at dessent dot net>]

Ulf Magnusson wrote:

> Just to check that I have understood the procedure and read the
> symlink-tree script properly, would the following be the right way to
> combine gcc and binutils using the symlink-tree script?
> 
> tar -xvjf gcc-recent.release.tar.bz2
> tar -xvjf binutils-not.so.recent.release.tar.bz2
> cd binutils-not.so.recent.release
> ./symlink-tree ../gcc-recent.release
> configure ...
> make ...

I guess that would work, but you might want to try a build to verify.  I
have not personally used symlink-tree.  I think a more common approach
that you'll find in tutorials is to create a new dir, that consists of
entirely links:

tar jxf gcc-?.?.?.tar.bz2
tar jxf binutils-?.?.?.tar.bz2
mkdir combined && cd combined
../gcc/symlink-tree ../binutils-?.?.?
../gcc/symlink-tree ../gcc-?.?.?

You could also do this with "cp -puR" or tar to merge the trees (if you
don't care about disk space) or with "cpio -l" and hard links, as
suggested in <http://gcc.gnu.org/simtest-howto.html>.

> Oh, and shouldn't srcdir be quoted when it's assigned and used in the
> script, to correctly handle paths with whitespace in them?

Probably.  Although having pathnames with spaces in them will probably
throw a wrench into the build in other places as well so I'd suggest
avoiding it if at all possible.  I would say file a bug report for any
place where an unquoted argument causes a failure due to spaces in
filenames, but I don't know if the official stance is "that isn't
supported" or not.

Brian