Including linaro gcc patches
So, Linaro have been doing a load of arm-relevant work on gcc which
you can see here: https://code.launchpad.net/gcc-linaro
Mostly that work has been merging backend changes from the
Codesourcery versions of GCC
I am no expert on the details of these patchsets but there has been a
fair amount of work on optimisations, fixing bugs and including
support for newer CPUs/architecture flavours.
Now not that much of this work is directly relevant to Debian yet as
we are still building with pretty conservative ('old' from the
Linaro/ARM view of the world :-) ) options, but some of it probably is
useful.
It seems to me that we should include those patches in the Debian GCC
uploads, but not actually enable them yet. This allows people to
easily build a version including that new stuff and test how it works
for us.
It also helps with the goal of building cross-compilers in the
archive, which is a goal agreed at Debconf9 (because the
cross-compiler build rules have been merged into the normal build
rules, making the whole much cleaner than it was). Again, nothing
changes unless you activate the new targets, which we can choose to do
independently of uploading a version including this possibility.
And finally it makes life easier for people doing derivative builds of
the archive, such as the much-discussed recently armhf port (because
they no longer need to use an external toolchain to get support for
their options, they can just rebuild the Debian one in the standard way).
Doko is happy to include this stuff in the Debian GCC uploads but does
not want to do it without being asked by the porters. So, does anyone
see reasons why we shouldn't do this, and would anyone go further by
sugesting patches sufficiently important and (and safe) that we should
actually include them in the build?
Wookey
--
Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM
http://wookware.org/
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