Re: [gentoo-alt] Restructuring the bootstrap (or: getting rid of gcc 4.2)

["François Bissey" <francois.bissey@canterbury.ac.nz>]

On Sun, 02 Feb 2014 21:41:13 Ruud Koolen wrote:
> On Sunday 02 February 2014 20:55:04 Francois Bissey wrote:
> > On 3/02/2014, at 6:34, Ruud Koolen <redlizard@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > >But gcc and friends are specifically designed to be buildable on any
> > >ridiculous old system, and the use of other tools hasn't changed between
> > >
> > > my bootstrap process and the current one. Again, can you elaborate and
> > > give a concrete example?
> > 
> > Ridiculously old systems? AIX will come with gcc 4.2 if you are lucky. I
> > never managed to compile a recent gcc with an IBM compiler.
> 
> Interesting; this should be possible. I'll see whether I can test this.
> 

The gcc page on the subject may be out of date. May be you can bootstrap
gcc-4.2 with xlc but I never tried that since I had it already.


> > gcc 4.8 has raised the bar significantly in terms of how new your compiler
> > needs to be.
> 
> That is a very good point. My plans and tests so far were in terms of gcc
> 4.7, but gcc 4.8 and later require a C++ compiler to build, which is not
> something we want to rely on. Thus, upgrading the bootstrap compiler would
> upgrade to 4.7 only and no further, and I don't see a way to change that in
> the future.
> > In the case of AIX I had to build and use a more recent gcc (4.6.x or
> > 4.7.x
> > I don’t remember) before being able to gcc 4.8.1. I also manage some SLES
> > 11SP1 ppc64 boxes, gcc 4.8.1 will not build with the gcc 4.3.4 that come
> > as
> > default. I don’t think it even compile with the alternate gcc 4.5
> > toolchain
> > they provide.
> > 
> > François
> 
> What about gcc 4.7?
> 

gcc-4.7 is not provided by SLES 11SP1 you may be thinking of SP2 or SP3.

Francois