Re: ADA frontend?

[joel at OARcorp dot com]

On Mon, 7 Sep 1998, Jeffrey A Law wrote:

> 
>   In message <Pine.LNX.3.96.980906203715.26730D-100000@oar3remote.oarcorp.com>you write:
>   > On 6 Sep 1998, Samuel Tardieu wrote:
>   > 
>   > > IMO, but I couldn't find any reason to do this since cross-compiling
>   > > with GCC (and GNAT) is really easy and needs to be done only once per
>   > > platform.
>   > 
>   > The biggest problem on many "marginally supported" hosts is that the
>   > binary for gnat gets out of date.  Isn't even the Linux x86 gnat 3.10p
>   > binary suffering from this? 
> Yup.  I found this out myself when I wanted to built Ada on my
> i686-pc-linux-gnu box.  The provided binaries would not work.

At least one of the problems is that the size of sigset_t changed to 1024
bits as part of (I think) the libc transitions.  This is broken in 3.10p.
I suppose that to be problem, the gnat run-time would have to detect the
difference between the various Linux libc's.

I think the specs file was broken on the binary.  I hand hacked at it and
copied files around from a working gcc to get there last time I had to use
it.

> Luckily I'm familiar enough with gcc that I could pick up the various
> pieces I needed from the binary dist, combine them with my existing
> glibc2 egcs build and make them work.  Thus avoiding have to build
> ada as a cross compiler :-)

I only use the binary distributions long enough to build from source.  
I recommend the same to anyone who asks.

Setting the GCC environment variables only confuses things when multiple
toolsets are installed.

--joel