Documenting tools necessary for GCC [draft]

[David O'Brien]

On Thu, May 29, 2003 at 01:27:41PM -0400, Kaveh R. Ghazi wrote:
> To build GCC:
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
> A working Bourne (or compatible) shell, or
> GNU bash version 2.??? (or later)
> 
> Necessary when running configure because some /bin/sh shells have bugs
> or disastrous corner-case performance problems.  Set CONFIG_SHELL in
> your environment to your "good" shell prior to running configure/make.
> Sometimes /bin/ksh is sufficient, sometimes it isn't.  See the
> host/target specific instructions for your platform, or use bash to be
> sure.
> ------------------------------------------------------

I'd really like this to state a POSIX compliant shell, and list the exact
POSIX spec (and year) that OS's must adhere to.

> To develop/modify GCC (all of the above tools plus):
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
> autoconf version 2.13 (NO earlier or later versions)
> GNU m4 version 1.4 (or later)
> 
> Necessary when modifying configure.in, aclocal.m4, etc to regenerate
> configure and config.in files
> ------------------------------------------------------

Why can't GCC come out of the dark ages and state autoconf 2.5x?


> ------------------------------------------------------
> GNU Bison version 1.28 (or later)
> Flex version 2.5.4 (or later)
> 
> Necessary when modifying *.y (bison) or *.l (flex).
> 
> Necessary to build GCC during development because the generated output
> files are not included in the cvs repository.  They are included in
> releases.
> ------------------------------------------------------

More so than any Gmake concerns, the BSD's need the basic languages:
C/C++/FORTRAN to be buildable with YACC rather than Bison.  I know Java
requires Bison, and that is fine from the BSD POV.

-- 
-- David  (obrien@FreeBSD.org)