Version 0.0 of binutils is unsurprisingly feature-poor

[Zack Weinberg]

Phil Edwards <phil@jaj.com> writes:
>
> Wheeeee, the gcc configury for binutils is so broken.  I don't know how
> this is expected to work.  This really looks like it's in the middle of
> changing, except the timestamp is days old.

I don't know a lot about this, but ...

> Yeah, version 0 doesn't support a whole lot of features.  I wouldn't
> think version 0 would even support, ya know, *assembling*, but version==0
> doesn't signal an error.  Also, some of the tests don't pass a version,
> so when the bogus $gcc_cv_as is run for that test, it fails.

Most (all?) of the tests are for optional features - if we haven't got
them, we may not be able to do spiffy things like .hidden, is all.  So
failing a version check is quiet.

> (Since binutils is built first, there's an assembler binary already in
> place.  The gcc configury knows this and symlinks to it.  Why not run it to
> discover its version instead of grepping through Makefile.in and company?
> Presumably there's some kind of evil situation where the created symlink
> points to a nonexistant binary or something?)

When host != build, we can't run that assembler at all.  Also, the
toplevel configure-gcc target may depend only on configure-gas, not
all-gas (I haven't gone and looked).

zw