OpenBSD & egcs, official information

[Marc Espie <Marc dot Espie at liafa dot jussieu dot fr>]

There now IS a real port of egcs  to OpenBSD... it would be nice if
the configure.in information could be upgraded to NOT mislead people,
and some mention could be put in the FAQ about the status of egcs and
OpenBSD.

There are some substantial differences between NetBSD and OpenBSD,
(openbsd is better :)   ) and configuring a netbsd machine as openbsd
may cause you some trouble. Specifically, we're definitely NOT elf, and
our assembler and linker have a few kinks.

OpenBSD configuration does not exist for all machines yet, testers
and people who know how to port egcs would be welcome. The initial port was 
mostly to check our gcc 2.8.1 information against netbsd gcc 2.8.1, see
how it changed in egcs, and use that.

There is some problem with folding the changes back to the FSF: part of
OpenBSD specific files are difficult to trace, so copyright assignment
is going to be a problem... I'm also guilty.  There is no question of
an actual employer grabbing my work over, but I'm supposed to work
on my PhD thesis, and my advisor will probably frown if I ask him to
sign this kind of paper right now...

Anyway, egcs is now part of the regular OpenBSD ports tree, check
www.openbsd.org for details about how to obtain a current version of our 
ports tree (but if you're using OpenBSD, you should already know that). 
I am trying to track both egcs-1.1b and the latest snapshot.  I still have 
a few details to check up, but I should be contributing test results 
regularly from now on.

egcs-1.1b builds fine under i386 and m68k, apart from that m68k-coff
constructor optimization problem which means we have to use collect2. 
I just checked 1.1.1-pre-release2 on i386 without any hastles 
(how does one use the objc testsuite ? it seems I'm missing some 
includes, like objc.h).  The sparc architecture is also making some
progress, we actually debunked a bug in our assembler...

Snapshots tend to be on a par with other operating systems: parts work,
parts don't. Caveat emptor.
-- 
	Marc Espie		
|anime, sf, juggling, unicycle, acrobatics, comics...
|AmigaOS, OpenBSD, C++, perl, Icon, PostScript...
| `real programmers don't die, they just get out of beta'