Bug#629819: libc6: gcc-4.2 from lenny no longer works

[Andy Chittenden <andyc@bluearc.com>]

Hi Jonathan

> 	  The toolchain in Debian has been updated to cope with that, and most
	  build systems should be unaffected. If you are using a non-Debian
	  toolchain to build your software and it is not able to cope with
	  multiarch, you might try to pass the following options to your
	  compiler:

	    -I/usr/include/$arch --sysroot /usr/lib/$arch

We're not using a non-Debian toolchain: we're using gcc-4.2 that came with lenny and gcc-4.3 from squeeze. Using those options didn't work with gcc-4.2 from lenny or gcc-4.3 from squeeze. Despite a lot of trying yesterday, the only way I've found for sorting out the backward compatibility issue is to create symlinks from /lib and /usr/lib to $arch versions. Perhaps there should be a "compat" package for doing that officially. Even trying to use the latest gcc wrapper to invoke gcc 4.2 using gcc -V4.2 doesn't work:

root@faraday:~# gcc --version
gcc (Debian 4.6.1-4) 4.6.1
Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

root@faraday:~# gcc -V4.2
gcc: error: unrecognized option ?-V4.2?
gcc: fatal error: no input files
compilation terminated.
root@faraday:~#

I'd've thought that would be an acceptable workaround. Or have sid versions of gcc-4.2 and gcc-4.3 that do the right thing.

-- 
Andy, BlueArc Engineering