[plugins] [patch] Initial implementation of GCC plugin support

[Basile STARYNKEVITCH]

Benjamin Smedberg wrote:
> On 2/23/09 4:37 PM, Joseph S. Myers wrote:
>
>   
>> Your plugin can't have been using the real.h structures, which changed 
>> between 4.3.1 and 4.3.2, then.  There are no guarantees of ABI 
>> compatibility even within a release branch, |...]
> Yes, we realize that there are no guarantees, and that things may break.
> That doesn't mean GCC should make drastic rules rejecting plugins that don't
> match exactly.
>
>   
>>> for us to be able to ship the same plugin for all versions of Fedora Core X,
>>> or Debian X, rather than tie it so tightly to a particular minor version.
>>>       
>> It's very likely you could ship the same plugin sources, which would then 
>> need to be built to separate binaries for each different GCC version.
>>     
>
> Building the plugin requires having the GCC sources, not just the plugin
> sources. GCC sources don't normally come with distros, so you have to go
> through fairly complicated hoops to get the GCC sources which match the
> binaries installed on your system.

I'm not sure that building the plugin should require all the GCC source.

I would suppose that future [Linux] distributions might provide a 
gcc-4.6 package for the GCC compiler (a future one obviously), and 
another gcc-4.6-dev package which provide all the headers (but no more) 
needed to compile (or build) compatible GCC plugins.
Perhaps even the gcc-4.6-dev package might even provide a shell script 
(or maybe a pkg-config *.pc file?) to facilitate building plugins

Actually, my MELT branch does already provide similar stuff, and it 
definitely has to, since MELT may generate a C file (during special GCC 
invocations) and then dlopen it.

Regards.

-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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