Mark Mitchell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I would strongly oppose downloading stuff during the build > process. We're not in the apt-get business; we can leave that to the > GNU/Linux distributions, the Cygwin distributors, etc. If you want to > build a KDE application, you have to first build/download the KDE > libraries; why should GCC be different?
Because gcc is the first step in bringing up a new system. Having complex sets of dependencies makes people's lives harder. I'm sure we've all had the unpleasant experience of trying to build something from the net only to discover that we had to build five other things first. It sucks. If we were requiring libraries which were normally installed, I wouldn't mind so much. But I had to download and build my own copy of MPFR for Fedora Core 5, which is a recent and popular distribution (GMP, at least, was already installed). > > I think that if we stick with our current approach, we will have a lot > > of bug reports and dissatisfied users when gcc 4.3 is released. > > I'd argue that the minority of people who are building from source > should not be our primary concern. Obviously, all other things being > equal, we should try to make that easy -- but if we can deliver a > better compiler (as Kaveh has already shown we can with his patch > series), then we should prioritize that. For those that want to build > from source, we should provide good documentation, and clear > instructions as to where to find what they need, but we should assume > they can follow complicated instructions -- since the process is > already complicated. I disagree: the process of building gcc from a release (as opposed to building the development version of gcc) really isn't complicated. The only remotely non-standard thing that is required is GNU make. Given that, all you need to do is "SRCDIR/configure; make". Admittedly, people often get even that simple instruction wrong. But it is easy to explain what to do. I'm certainly not saying that we should pull out GMP and MPFR. But I am saying that we need to do much much better about making it easy for people to build gcc. Sure, the people who build gcc aren't our primary concern. But they are a major concern, if only because those are the people who are our future developers. Ian
