Bootstrap failure: objdir=srcdir, FreeBSD make

[Mark Mitchell]

>>>>> "Gerald" == Gerald Pfeifer <pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at> writes:

    Gerald> On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, David O'Brien wrote:
    >> I've never dreamed of getting the GCC bootstrap to work with
    >> Bmake.  Is there actually interest in making it work?

    Gerald> Why not? All that GCC is *supposed* to require, is a POSIX
    Gerald> compliant make.

FWIW, I've never thought that this was a particularly good policy,
even though I acknowledge it to be our current policy.

I would far prefer that we require GNU make.  In practice, we run into
problems with non-GNU makes, and there are lots of places where
extensions in GNU make would be very handy.  At this point, GNU make
runs on most systems of interest, including BSD, Windows, GNU/Linux,
HPUX, AIX, IRIX, Solaris and probably others. 

I believe that the rationale has been that users shouldn't have to
build GNU make before installing GCC.  For one thing, building GNU
make would be hard without a C compiler.  However, building GCC is
hard without a C compiler, too, and IIRC GNU make doesn't require GCC
to build.  

The other rationale is that BSD systems do the `make world' thing, and
they want to use BSD make for that.  But, it seems to me that part of
`make world' could be `make gmake', and then `gmake gcc'.  

So, I guess I've never seen why we make ourselves work hard to satisfy
this requirement.

--
Mark Mitchell                   mark@codesourcery.com
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