Re: [PATCH]: bump minimum MPFR version, (includes some fortranbits)

[Tobias SchlÃter <Tobias dot Schlueter at physik dot uni-muenchen dot de>]

Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 02:37:13PM +0200, Tobias SchlÃter wrote:
> > Markus Milleder wrote:
> > > Adrian Bunk schrieb am 13.10.2008 17:41:15:
> > > > E.g. the next stable release of Debian will likely ship with 2.3.1 .
> > > > So in this specific case fulfilling a 2.3.1 requirement would be easy,
> > > > while a 2.3.2 requirement would make it much harder to build gcc 4.4 .
> > > Much harder ?
> > >
> > > I don't think anybody who tries to build GCC from source will have any
> > > problem building MPFR first.
> > They don't even need to do this, as mpfr can be built in-tree.  It then  
> > also won't interfere with a system-wide mpfr.
...
> > This is moot because for the reason given above, these hypothetical  
> > regressions are restricted to gcc if the person building gcc is careful.
>
> "careful" = uses an undocumented trick ?
>
> Or where at http://gcc.gnu.org/install/ is this documented?

Hm, maybe it's not.  I'm too lazy to search through all the 
documentation of the GNU build system.   While this may be written 
someplace, it would certainly be a good thing to generalize the 
paragraph about binutils in <http://gcc.gnu.org/install/download.html>.

Anyway, if you're afraid of regressions nothing prevents you from 
building another mpfr out-of-tree (which is documented), and use that, 
so the point is still moot.  If you use a static library there is no 
chance it will interfere with anything.

Greetings,
- Tobi