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Date:      Sun, 11 Aug 1996 10:59:52 -0600
From:      Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
To:        Andreas Klemm <andreas@klemm.gtn.com>
Cc:        current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Whither gcc 2.7? 
Message-ID:  <199608111659.KAA24937@rover.village.org>
In-Reply-To: Your message of Sat, 10 Aug 1996 16:41:25 %2B0200

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: Would it be a good compromise with respect to kernel stability, to
: call the old stable cc 'cc' and the new 2.7.2.x one 'gcc' ?!
: 
: Everybody could choose between cc and gcc via /etc/make.conf.
: 
: So we should perhaps add a contrib section with a bmaked contrib/gcc,
: so that the stable cc could stay where he is ?!

Actually, here's an idea.

We have the current stable gcc 2.6.3 that is known good and everyone
trusts.  Let's have a gcc port (yes, a port) that has 2.7.2 + the
2.7.2.1 prerelease patches + any other FreeBSD hacks that are needed
to make it work.  People can chose between /usr/bin/gcc and
/usr/local/bin/gcc via /etc/make.conf.  Over time, this would allow
those people that wanted to follow gcc more closely to do so, and to
have source available for easy importing into whatever scheme the core
kernel uses.  Yes, this is a lot of disk space, but no more wasteful
than having both emacs and XEmacs in the ports tree.  The version in
the ports tree would use gmake, just like emacs does now, and it
wouldn't be bmaked.  I've build recent gccs several times this way,
and it works well.

Another option is to slightly hack how FreeBSD does its C compiler
installation.  We could move from putting it in /usr/libexec to
placing it /usr/lib/gcc-lib/i386-unknown-freebsd2.2/<gcc-rev> so that
multiple versions of the compiler can co-exist peacefully.  The -V
option could them pick which version people wanted to use, with the
default being the stable one in the source tree.  NetBSD and OpenBSD
seem to have moved the compilers so that they live here (I may be
misreading the sources, I've not done a make install on one of these
systems), so there is BSD world precidence.

I'd also be happy to put together a port of gcc 2.7.2.1 so that people
that need the newer functionality (especially with g++) of that
revision can have it more easily than today.  I'd do that by grabbing
2.7.2 from prep or gatekeeper or freefall, applying the 2.7.2.1 trial
patches plus any other FreeBSD specific patches that would be needed,
as patch-aa, patch-ab, etc.  I'd install it into /usr/local/bin.  I'm
not married to any of this.

Comments?

Warner



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