Proposal for new organization of gcc

[Alexandre Oliva]

Richard Stallman writes:

> The C front end can be in a separate subdirectory,
> but it has to be in the base tar file.
> Everyone needs to build the C front end
> so as to be able to bootstrap.

Having the C front-end in the base tar file is ok for me, but I don't
like to be required to build it just because I want to install the
front-end for one more language.  In a perfect gcs, I'd be able to
download the gcs backend and the language front-end, build them with
the installed C compiler and install that, and I'm done.

I've considered this a very important feature since the first time I
tried to install g77 in an independent directory, and it took ages for
my SunOS 4.1.3 host to build the whole gcc archive and fix
include-files again, the ones it had just fixed one week before.

This is unnecessary, and I don't think it would be that hard to have
configure & Makefile set up so that they'd build the C compiler and
use it iff its sources are available.  If they're not, an already
installed C compiler should be used.

Obviously, if the C sources are not available, one is unable to
bootstrap the compiler, but then, the only reason for bootstrapping is
for building the C compiler, which wouldn't be built anyway in this
case.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva
mailto:oliva@dcc.unicamp.br mailto:aoliva@acm.org
http://www.dcc.unicamp.br/~oliva
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, SP, Brasil