Re: Feedback and Suggestions on GCC

[DJ Delorie <dj at redhat dot com>]

> *	First, I attempted to following the instructions at

As others have noted, you need a development environment in order to
build gcc.  For NT, that means you must have already installed MinGW,
Cygwin, or DJGPP (well, djgpp only if you install ntlfn; Microsoft
doesn't give DOS programs access to long file names on NT (but they do
on 9x)).

> *	Third, I then tried the DJGPP version.  Even though DJGPP is
> intended for use in the DOS environment, it was indeed easy to install,
> quick to learn, and worked very well in Windows 2000.  There was no need to
> learn UNIX concepts and commands since I was able to do the basic things I
> needed (create and edit source code, invoke the compiler and linker, etc.)
> from the command line under Windows.

:-) Of course, DJGPP is now 12 years old, so we've had a lot of
experience pleasing new users.

> The only problems are that DJGPP (being targeted to the DOS
> environment) does not make use of Windows capabilities,

Get the RSXNTDJ package for DJGPP to target Win32.

> and that it lacks some of the modern ISO/ANSI C++ features.

We're working on gcc 3.0, and plan on having a binary of it for djgpp
when it releases, or shortly after.

> *	The simplest thing is to take DJGPP and, while keeping it based on a
> command line interface, update it to (1) fix any bugs since the last
> release...2.03 about a year ago,

We've just started a release cycle.  DJGPP is a very popular package,
but there just aren't that many bug reports these days, and one or
more years between core releases is common for us.  If you have
specific bugs to report (in the runtime, at least), please email them
to djgpp@delorie.com

> (2) consider replacing DPMI and making it a
> real Win32 program.  But keep the command line interface:  it's nice, and
> don't waste time replacing it with a GUI.

You just described Cygwin or MinGW.  You don't *have* to use bash with
cygwin, just like you don't *have* to use command.com with DJGPP
(djgpp does come with bash et al, just like cygwin, it just isn't the
default).

> *	Clean up CONFIGURE.

We deleted configure.bat, if that's what you're talking about.  I
think the audience for building gcc, and the audience for *using* gcc,
are different things.  If you want to *build* gcc, you need a posix
environment, which djgpp and cygwin provide.  If you want to *use*
gcc, you can use the default dos/windows environment.

> In fact, take it a step further and do away
> with it.  Simply replace Step 2 and CONFIGURE as described above with a
> simple unpacking procedure that generates the required directory/folder tree
> with all the binaries already installed.

This is not the purpose of the gcc development group.  It *is* the
purpose of various other groups who support binary distributions, like
DJGPP or Cygwin.

> And then provide directions for
> setting up a few environment variables such as PATH, LIB, etc.

Like http://www.delorie.com/djgpp/zip-picker.html, which does exactly
that?

> *	To the extent I tried to make the Cygwin environment useful, it
> appeared to really be a command line interface...not a GUI...even though it
> presented itself through a "window."  That's fine, but make it quickly
> useful to Windows users by having a Windows command line set as an
> alternative to the UNIX command line set...perhaps by simply having invoke
> COMMAND.COM or CMD.COM.

Edit c:\cygwin\cygwin.bat to run cmd.exe instead of bash.exe.  That's all.