Status and rationale for toplevel bootstrap (was Re: Example of debugging GCC with toplevel bootstrap)

[Richard Guenther]

On 1/16/06, Richard Kenner <kenner@vlsi1.ultra.nyu.edu> wrote:
>
>     I never tried to "bootstrap" on x86_64 using --host=i686 --target=i686
>     to build a 32bit compiler building 32bit
>
> Well, that's my point.  It's not really a bootstrap.  First you use the
> cross-compiler to build a native compiler and *then* you bootstrap.

The question what is "native" here remains - on a biarch platform I can
run both 32bit and 64bit executables.  So the argument is we can
"stretch" the definition of a bootstrap or a native compiler a bit in allowing
all 32bit/64bit combinations as native configurations rather than
cross-compilers.
config.guess of course just uses uname to decide what the host environment is,
and uname does not know anything about bi-archness.

Richard.