FAQ patch
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk
Thu Jun 14 11:56:00 GMT 2001
I've applied the following patch to make some minor improvements to the
FAQ, and to link to faq.html again from index.html.
The FAQ could do with many more eyes on it trying to updating or improve
anything that by now is out of date.
Index: faq.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gcc/wwwdocs/htdocs/faq.html,v
retrieving revision 1.161
diff -u -r1.161 faq.html
--- faq.html 2001/06/14 18:12:32 1.161
+++ faq.html 2001/06/14 18:51:10
@@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
<li><a href="#general">General information</a>
<ol>
<li><a href="#gcc">What is the relationship between GCC and EGCS?</a></li>
- <li><a href="#cygnus">What is the relationship between GCC and Cygnus?</a></li>
+ <li><a href="#cygnus">What is the relationship between GCC and Cygnus / Red Hat?</a></li>
<li><a href="#open-development">What is an open development model?</a></li>
<li><a href="#bugreport">How do I report a bug?</a></li>
<li><a href="#support">How do I get a bug fixed or a feature added?</a></li>
@@ -105,18 +105,18 @@
<p>In April 1999 the Free Software Foundation officially halted
development on the gcc2 compiler and appointed the EGCS project as the
official GCC maintainers. The net result was a single project which
-will carry forward GCC development under the ultimate control of the
+carries forward GCC development under the ultimate control of the
<a href="steering.html">GCC Steering Committee</a>.</p>
<hr>
-<h2><a name="cygnus">What is the relationship between GCC and Cygnus</a></h2>
+<h2><a name="cygnus">What is the relationship between GCC and Cygnus / Red Hat</a></h2>
-<p>It is a common mis-conception that Cygnus controls GCC either
+<p>It is a common mis-conception that Red Hat controls GCC either
directly or indirectly.</p>
-<p>While Cygnus does donate hardware, network connections, code and
-developer time to GCC development, Cygnus does not control GCC.
+<p>While Red Hat does donate hardware, network connections, code and
+developer time to GCC development, Red Hat does not control GCC.
<p>Overall control of GCC is in the hands of the
<a href="steering.html">GCC Steering Committee</a>
@@ -125,16 +125,16 @@
decisions in the best interest of GCC and to help ensure that no
individual or company has control over the project.</p>
-<p>To summarize, Cygnus contributes to GCCproject, but does not exert
+<p>To summarize, Red Hat contributes to the GCC project, but does not exert
a controlling influence over GCC.</p>
<hr>
<h2><a name="open-development">What is an open development model?</a></h2>
-<p>With GCC, we are going to try a bazaar style
+<p>We are using a bazaar style
<a href="#cathedral-vs-bazaar"><b>[1]</b></a>
-approach to its development: We make snapshots publicly available to
-anyone who wants to try them; we're going to welcome anyone to join
+approach to GCC development: we make snapshots publicly available to
+anyone who wants to try them; we welcome anyone to join
the development mailing list. All of the discussions on the
development mailing list are available via the web. We're going to be
making releases with a much higher frequency than they have been made
@@ -160,9 +160,9 @@
process; FreeBSD, the Emacs lisp repository, and the Linux kernel are
a few examples of the bazaar style of development.</p>
-<p>With GCC, we will be adding new features and optimizations at a
+<p>With GCC, we are adding new features and optimizations at a
rate that has not been done since the creation of gcc2; these
-additions will inevitably have a temporarily destabilizing effect.
+additions inevitably have a temporarily destabilizing effect.
With the help of developers working together with this bazaar style
development, the resulting stability and quality levels will be better
than we've had before.</p>
@@ -174,7 +174,7 @@
terms: A <b>cathedral</b> development model versus a <b>bazaar</b>
development model. The paper is written by Eric S. Raymond, it is
called ``<a
- href=" http://locke.ccil.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html" ;>The
+ href=" http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/" ;>The
Cathedral and the Bazaar</a>''. The paper is a useful starting point
for discussions.
</blockquote>
@@ -183,7 +183,7 @@
<hr>
<h2><a name="bugreport">How do I report a bug?</a></h2>
-<p>There are complete instructions <a href = "bugs.html">here</a>.</p>
+<p>There are complete instructions <a href="bugs.html">here</a>.</p>
<hr>
@@ -209,7 +209,7 @@
from a commercial support organization since the people who read
gcc-bugs, if they choose to help you, will be volunteering their
time. This alternative will work best if you follow the directions
- on <a href="#bugreport">submitting bugreports</a>.</li>
+ on <a href="bugs.html">submitting bugreports</a>.</li>
<li>Fix it yourself. This alternative will probably bring results,
if you work hard enough, but will probably take a lot of time,
@@ -223,9 +223,8 @@
<h2><a name="noncvs">How can I get a development environment for GCC
without using CVS?</a></h2>
-<p>GCC snapshots are available from the FTP server and its mirrors, e.g.
-<a href=" ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/languages/egcs/snapshots/" ;>
- ftp://ftp.fu-berlin.de/unix/languages/egcs/snapshots/ </a></p>
+<p>GCC snapshots are available from the FTP server and its mirrors;
+see the <a href="mirrors.html">GCC mirror list</a>.
<hr>
@@ -352,7 +351,7 @@
<p>To ensure that GCC finds the GNU assembler (the GNU loader), which
are required by <a href="install/specific.html">some configurations</A>,
you should configure these with the same --prefix option as you used
-for GCC. Then build & install GNU as (GNU ld) and proceed with
+for GCC. Then build & install GNU as (GNU ld) and proceed with
building GCC.</p>
<p>Another alternative is to create links to GNU as and ld in any of
@@ -412,15 +411,13 @@
<p>The GCC testsuite is not included in the GCC 2.95 release due to the
uncertain copyright status of some tests.</p>
-<p>The GCC team will be reviewing the entire testsuite to find and remove
-any tests with uncertain copyright status. Once those tests are removed
-from the testsuite, the testsuite as a whole will be copyrighted under the
-terms of the GPL and included in future GCC releases.</p>
+<p>The GCC team has reviewed the entire testsuite to find and remove
+any tests with uncertain copyright status, following guidelines from
+Prof. Eben Moglen. The testsuite is included in GCC 3.0 and
+subsequent releases. Only a few tests needed to be removed from the
+testsuite.</p>
-<p>It is believed that only a few tests have uncertain copyright status and
-thus only a few tests will need to be removed from the testsuite.</p>
-
<hr>
<h2><a name="dejagnu">Unable to run the testsuite</a></h2>
@@ -475,11 +472,11 @@
following problems with some releases of widely used packages have
been identified:</p>
-<p>There is a separate <a href="bugs.html">list of well-known bugs</a>
+<p>There is a separate <a href="bugs.html#known">list of well-known bugs</a>
describing known deficiencies. Naturally we'd like that list to be of
zero length.</p>
-<p>To report a bug, see <a href="#bugreport">How to report bugs</a>.</p>
+<p>To report a bug, see <a href="bugs.html">How to report bugs</a>.</p>
<hr>
<h2><a name="stdin">Why can't I initialize a static variable with <tt>stdin</tt>?</a></h2>
@@ -508,7 +505,7 @@
<p>There is a common misconception that the GCC developers are
responsible for GNU libc. These are in fact two entirely separate
projects. The appropriate place to ask questions relating to GNU libc
-is <a href=" mailto:libc-alpha@sourceware.cygnus.com" ;>libc-alpha@sourceware.cygnus.com</a>.
+is <a href=" mailto:libc-alpha@sources.redhat.com" ;>libc-alpha@sources.redhat.com</a>.
</p>
<hr>
@@ -583,19 +580,22 @@
<p>This is a bit more typing, but I personally think it's better style
in addition to being more portable.
+<p>In recent versions of glibc, <code>printf</code> is among the
+functions which are implemented as macros.
+
<h2><a name="rounding">Problems with floating point computations</a></h2>
<p>In a number of cases, GCC appears to perform floating point
computations incorrectly. For example, the program</p>
<pre>
-#include <iostream.h>
+#include <iostream.h>
main() {
double min = 0.0;
double max = 0.5;
double width = 0.01;
- cout << (int)(((max - min) / width) - 1) << endl;
+ cout << (int)(((max - min) / width) - 1) << endl;
}
</pre>
@@ -735,12 +735,13 @@
the production versions do not necessarily handle all features needed
to rebuild GCC.</p>
-<p>Autoconf is available from
-<a href=" http://sourceware.cygnus.com/autoconf/" ;>
- http://sourceware.cygnus.com/autoconf/ </a>; have a look at
-<a href=" ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/egcs/infrastructure/" ;>
- ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/egcs/infrastructure/ </a> for the other packages.
-</p>
+<p>In general, the current versions of these tools from <a
+href=" ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/" ;> ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/ </a> will work.
+At present, Autoconf 2.50 is not supported, and you will need to use
+Autoconf 2.13; work is in progress to fix this problem. Also look at
+<a href=" ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/infrastructure/" ;>
+ ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/infrastructure/ </a> for any special versions
+of packages.</p>
<hr>
<h2><a name="conflicts">Conflicts when using cvs update</a></h2>
@@ -764,18 +765,10 @@
<hr>
<h2><a name="gnat">Using GCC with GNAT/Ada </a></h2>
-<p>The GNU Ada front-end is not currently supported by GCC; however, it is
-possible to build the GNAT compiler with a little work.</p>
-
-<p>First, retrieve the gnat-3.10p sources. The sources for the Ada front
-end and runtime all live in the "ada" subdirectory. Move that subdirectory
-to egcs/gcc/ada.</p>
+<p>The GNU Ada front-end is not currently supported by GCC, but work
+is in progress to integrate GNU Ada into the GCC CVS repository and
+produce new releases based on current versions of GCC.</p>
-<p>Second, apply the patch found in egcs/gcc/README.gnat.</p>
-
-<p>Finally, rebuild per the GNAT build instructions.</p>
-
-
<hr>
<h2><a name="cvssnapshots">Using CVS to download snapshots</a></h2>
@@ -815,6 +808,9 @@
<hr>
<h2><a name="squangle">How to work around too long C++ symbol names
(<tt>-fsquangle</tt>)</a></h2>
+
+<p>This question does not apply to GCC 3.0 or later versions, which
+have a new C++ ABI with much shorter mangled names.</p>
<p>If the standard assembler of your platform can't cope with the
large symbol names that the default g++ name mangling mechanism
Index: index.html
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvs/gcc/wwwdocs/htdocs/index.html,v
retrieving revision 1.251
diff -u -r1.251 index.html
--- index.html 2001/06/04 08:55:53 1.251
+++ index.html 2001/06/14 18:51:10
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
</TD></TR>
<TR BGCOLOR="#FFFFBB"><TD>
<P>
-<A HREF=" http://gcc.gnu.org/cgi-bin/fom" ;>FAQ</A><BR>
+<A HREF=" http://gcc.gnu.org/faq.html" ;>FAQ</A><BR>
<A HREF="install/index.html">Installation</A><BR>
<A HREF="install/specific.html">Platforms</A><BR>
<A HREF="onlinedocs/">Manual</A><BR>
--
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk
More information about the Gcc-patches
mailing list