I have been struggling with this issue, and now that I have
successfully built GCC I thought I would share my results. Hopefully
it can help someone better versed in autotools to improve the build
of GCC with GMP/MPFR.
For reference, a few older threads I've found:
<a href="http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-01/msg00333.html";>http://
gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2006-01/msg00333.html</a>
<a href="http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-bugs/2006-03/
msg00723.html">http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-bugs/2006-03/msg00723.html</a>
The long and short of it: my builds of the latest versions of GMP and
MPFR were perfectly fine, although not ideal for building GCC.
However, the GCC 4.1.1 configure script incorrectly decided that it
_had_ located useful copies of GMP and MPFR, while in fact the
GFortran build fails 90 minutes later with the error message (as in
the second thread above):
"../.././libgfortran/mk-kinds-h.sh: Unknown type"
This was configuring GCC via:
../srcdir/configure --with-gmp=/usr/local/lib64 --with-mpfr=/usr/
local/lib64
I now understand that this is a mis-use of these options, however
recall configure was successful (I still do not understand why),
while configure failed with the 'correct' options '--with-gmp=/usr/
local --with-mpfr=/usr/local' (because *.h are in /usr/local/include,
but *.a are in /usr/local/lib64).
I was finally successful by using the build-directories rather than
the installed libraries via:
../srcdir/configure --with-gmp-dir=/usr/local/gmp --with-mpfr-dir=/
usr/local/mpfr
but only after I made the symlink:
ln -s /usr/local/mpfr/.libs/libmpfr.a /usr/local/mpfr/libmpfr.a
One issue here is that '--with-mpfr=path' assumes that 'libmpfr.a' is
in 'path/lib' (not true for how I installed it), while '--with-mpfr-
dir=path' assumes that 'libmpfr.a' is in 'path', rather than
'path/.libs' (can this work for anyone?). Note that '--with-gmp-
dir=path' does look in 'path/.libs'.
This is all on RHEL4 x86_64. Note I am new to x86_64 and multilibs --
this certainly added to my difficulties. The machine does have older
versions of GMP and MPFR installed in /usr/lib and /usr/lib64, while
I had installed the latest versions in /usr/local (with the libraries
in /usr/local/lib64). I would also note that GMP unfortunately hard-
codes the bitness of the libraries in gmp.h, and that the older
system /usr/include/gmp.h identifies itself as 64-bit (there are no
#define switches as I would have expected).
My comments:
1) It would have been very useful to have explicit configure options
such as --with-gmp-lib=path and --with-gmp-include=path (etc) that
explicitly locate the *.a and *.h directories, rather than (or in
addition to) the existing "install directory" and "build directory"
options.
2) Ideally IMHO the top-level configure (or at least the libgfortran
configure) would test the execution of some or all of the required
functions in GMP/MPFR. I vaguely recall that this is possible with
autoconf, and should be more robust. Would it add too much complexity
to the top-level configure?
Thanks,
- Matt
