Re: Sparc buildd a cross-compiler?
On Sat, Dec 22, 2001 at 01:49:12PM -0500, Ben Collins wrote:
> Of course it is broken. It is _not_ supported on sparc, other than to
> make it available to users. _I_ do not want anything built on sparc that
> doesn't use the default compiler (except in cases such as libc6-sparc64
> where we obviously have to use the 64-bit capable gcc-3.0 compiler).
>
> It should be policy that programs are required to use the default
> compiler on an arch. You create serious overhead on arch maintainence
> when you ignore that.
[Sorry if I'm just being paranoid; I may just be knee-jerking to A
Pronouncement From The Debian Project Leader which isn't.]
While I don't disagree with such a policy in general, I think that
exceptions should be allowed.
On ia64, there really isn't a super-strong code generation engine
available. The default gcc (2.96!) is a bit behind in bugfixes, and
gcc 3.x, although much better at generating ia64 code, has other
weaknesses. We try to build everything with gcc 2.96 as much as
possible, but in some cases, gcc 3.0 is required to get code that
works. In those cases, we haven't seen anything wrong with
debian/rules hackery to set CC=gcc-3.0 and so on, and Build-Depend on
gcc-3.0 [ia64].
Is this something you object to? I understand how you might object on
sparc, since gcc 2.95 has supported sparc for a long time now. But on
newer architectures, we may not have the luxury to mandate a single
gcc version.
And if you object, could you suggest a solution? Some of the packages
affected are very large and complex and "fix the problem in the source
of your package" would, most likely, involve quite a bit of work. I
suspect in a few of those cases that the only feasible response would
be to remove the package from the architecture, which seems a shame if
building with a different compiler would fix the problem.
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