My proposal for the libgcc runtime ABI (ia64 gcc/glibc is broken.)

[Jeffrey A Law]

  In message < m3k8etle7z.fsf@otr.mynet.cygnus.com >you write:
  > Mark Kettenis <kettenis@wins.uva.nl> writes:
  > 
  > > This isn't necessary at all.  The shared libgcc belongs in /lib.  If
  > > the GCC folks do their job properly, and take care of backwards
  > > compatibility issues, installing GCC can simply upgrade it if the
  > > version provided with the new GCC has the highest "version number".
  > 
  > Letting it all to the gcc folks has one major drawback: they will
  > either have to keep track of ABI changes for every single
  > architecture/OS combination or they will have to bump the version
  > number whenever something changed on any of the supported platforms.
  > The latter has the concequences that after a while you'l have dozends
  > of libgcc.so of which you cannot remove a single one unless you are
  > making sure everything is recompiled.  This latter approach will never
  > get my blessing but of course I cannot prevent the gcc people from
  > making this mistake.
What would you recommend then?  Considering that we can not tie GCC to glibc
since GCC is used on a lot of systems that do not use glibc?

We're certainly open to suggestions -- a shared libgcc has a number of nasty
problems that need solving (but it also solves a huge number of nasty problems
that we've had over the years).

jeff