On 19.02.13 20:54, Mikhail T. wrote:
My complaint is that, though the port "works" out of the box, the
office@ maintainers have given up on the base compiler too easily --
comments in the makefile make no mention of any bug-reports filed with
anyone, for example. It sure seems, no attempts were made to analyze
the failures... I don't think, such "going with the flow" is
responsible and am afraid, the inglorious days of building a special
compiler just for the office will return...
Neither of these "best open source office suites" is supposed to be
built from source, by the "normal" user. As already mentioned, normal
users are guided to use the pre-compiled binaries. The reasons for this
are many and different. Only one of the reasons is that those ports are
rather complex and let's not forget it - buggy. They more or less
require special build environments, which are easier provided, as you
guessed it, by an purposely configured compiler. Since the ports
themselves are huge, compiling an relatively small compiler for the
purpose to build the rest is ok. Count it as 'bootstrap' process. I for
one, don't buy your argument that the makefile lacks enough "evidence"
of why certain choices were made - it is an file with instructions for
the computer, after all. Humans discuss these things at other places.
Am I really the only one here disturbed by the fact, that the
compilers shipped as cc(1) and/or c++(1) in our favorite operating
system's most recent stable versions (9.1 and 8.3) are considered buggy?
As already mentioned, the compilers in the base exist in order to
compile FreeBSD and bootstrap other compilers. For that purpose, even
the ancient gcc does the job. It even does the job for many, many ports
as well. Nobody has ever made the promise that the base cc will compile
any source code thrown at it.
Because it is buggy and because newer versions have different license,
that doesn't fit well with FreeBSD, gcc is being phased out from FreeBSD
and replaced by llvm/clang. Still a work in progress and might not be
complete for 10.0.
On 19.02.2013 13:05, Adrian Chadd wrote:
.. I think the compiler people just use the port as compiled with the
compiler that is known to work with it, and move on.
Such people would, perhaps, be even better served by an RPM-based
system, don't you think? But I don't think so -- the amount of OPTIONS
in the port is large, and a lot of people are likely to build their
own. Not because they like it, but because they want a PostgreSQL
driver or KDE4 (or GTK3) interface or...
This is why it exists as source code and FreeBSD port. I myself build
all software from source, whatever it takes. And if it requires that I
have dozen of special-purpose gcc versions built in the process, I don't
care.
For people with less resources and patience, there is the precompiled
binary package. An RPM-like technology.
Daniel
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