Given that I did not receive any feedback on my earlier email on this topic, I would like to send this patch for RFC. I'm not expert at this configury-stuff, so please try to comment on both the test proposed and my actual implementation :)
The idea is to find a patch which both catches probable issues early on for most x86_64-linux users, yet does not make build more complex for our power users. So, I propose to include a specific check in toplevel configure: The cumulative conditions I suggest, in order to make it as unobtrusive as possible for current users, are: 1. if we build a native compiler, 2. on x86_64-linux (and possible other x86_64 targets whose maintainers want to opt in), 3. and neither --enable-multilib nor --disable-multilib were passed then: a. we check that the native compiler can handle 32-bit, by compiling a test executable with the "-m32" option b. if we fail, we error out of the configure process, indicating that this can be overriden with --{enable,disable}-multilib I suspect this might catch (at configure time) the large majority of users who currently get stuck at stage 2 with the "gnu/stubs-32.h" error, while being invisible to a large majority of the power users. So, what do you think? FX
Index: configure.ac =================================================================== --- configure.ac (revision 201292) +++ configure.ac (working copy) @@ -2861,6 +2861,26 @@ case "${target}" in ;; esac +# Special user-friendly check for native x86_64-linux build, if +# multilib is not explicitly enabled. +case "$target:$have_compiler:$host:$target:$enable_multilib" in + x86_64-*linux*:yes:$build:$build:) + # Make sure we have a developement environment that handles 32-bit + dev64=no + echo "int main () { return 0; }" > conftest.c + ${CC} -m32 -o conftest ${CFLAGS} ${CPPFLAGS} ${LDFLAGS} conftest.c + if test $? = 0 ; then + if test -s conftest || test -s conftest.exe ; then + dev64=yes + fi + fi + rm -f conftest* + if test x${dev64} != xyes ; then + AC_MSG_ERROR([I suspect your system does not have 32-bit developement libraries (libc and headers). If you have them, rerun configure with --enable-multilib. If you do not have them, and want to build a 64-bit-only compiler, rerun configure with --disable-multilib.]) + fi + ;; +esac + # Default to --enable-multilib. if test x${enable_multilib} = x ; then target_configargs="--enable-multilib ${target_configargs}"