Re: Native EGCS 1.0.3a available
"Bradley D. LaRonde" <brad@ltc.com> writes:
> What kinds of things do you see this compiler being used for at this point?
Probably it's first goal will be to obsolete itself. GCC 2.95.1, with
Jay Carlson's 9916 patches, is up to stage 1, and the stage 1 compiler
seems as though it's working on stage 2.
In the medium term, I had lots of problems getting various packages to
configure themselves for cross-compilation. Most egregious was
ncurses, which I desperately wanted to get better feedback off the
console, but I also had trouble with diff, bison, gmake, and gawk.
The configuration procedure simply breaks down at some point when
unable to run test programs. Eventually, supposing that the
differences in architecture are probably generally outweighed by the
differences in operating system, I ran configure natively on the host,
and then hacked configure to make it get the right answer and stop
exit()ing.
With a native compiler and build environment accessible to the target
over NFS, the configure script can be run natively on the target,
allowing the developer to let autoconf discover dependencies and
architectural differences more accurately, regardless of whether the
eventual build is done with the native compiler or with a cross on a
faster host.
I also have longer-term dreams of porting dpkg, Debian's package
manager, which would allow us to contribute and share our work more
effectively with the debian-mips effort. It might also be helpful for
package management and synchronization of software installation
between a host computer and the H/PsPC.
Besides, I want perl :)
--
Robert Coie
Implementor, Apropos Ltd.
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