g77/f2c configuration

[Craig Burley]

[This should have been cc'ed to the lists I've cc'ed my follow-up to; FYI]

>I remember spending several days swapping e-mail with someone tracking down
>a "g77 problem" which ultimately turned out to arise from inconsistencies
>between
>their installed f2c and what g77 was expecting - somehow the two were being
>mixed in an unfortunate (and mysterious) manner.

That's *very* useful feedback.

>I wholeheartedly endorse anything to clearly separate/dis-ambiguate g77 from
>f2c stuff; libg2c sounds like one good way of doing that...

Yes, and I've since been convinced by someone else to go ahead and
rename g77's "installed" version of f2c.h to g2c.h, so it's easier
for sysadmins to cope with merging f2c/g77 installations.

I've done most of the relevant editing in g77 0.5.23-in-progress,
and am in the process of trying to get it to build.  I'm also
doing a lot of "normalizing" and cleaning up of the relevant
scripts and makefiles.  (Which I've wanted to do for years, but now
having a bit more `sh' and `make' knowledge, plus a much faster machine
with more disk space, to repeatedly test big builds and such,
it's now feasible.)

Once I shake out the obvious problems in 0.5.23 and get that out to
alpha test, I'll look at making most of the same changes in egcs for
version 1.1.  It'll probably take longer, because doing it in phases
(separating renaming from normalizing from various sorts of simplifying)
seems wisest for a project like egcs, with so many contributors.

        tq vm, (burley)