gcc 4.8.1 made it to Debian Sid

[H. S. Teoh]

On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 08:22:54PM +0200, Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 07/05/2013 08:02 PM, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> > Thanks so much for posting the exact steps! I finally got around to
> > retrying to build GDC with GCC-4.8. Using your steps above, it
> > worked!!!
> 
> Fantastic!  So glad it finally worked for you.
> 
> > There was no trouble at all, except for an initial hiccup of having
> > to install libmpc-dev (but the configure script was pretty good
> > about stating exactly what is missing). The build went smoothly. To
> > the above steps, I'd only add 'make install' as the final step. :)
> 
> Yes, I think there are one or two dependencies not mentioned on the GDC wiki
> which I discovered when first trying to build it.  There's certainly an
> unmentioned package which is needed for the test suite.

I think libmpc-dev is mentioned on the wiki as a prerequisite (well,
libmpc is, but hopefully Debian users know to install the -dev packages
as well).


> One of these days I'll have to set up a fresh system and try a build
> on it just to document what they are.

Good idea. It should be relatively easy to setup a chroot for this
purpose, if you don't want to go all-out to have a brand new system.
IIRC it's just a matter of installing and running debootstrap to create
a bare-minimum system in a subdir, which you can then chroot into and
install the necessary packages.


> > I think the fact that gcc-4.8 supports multiarch without needing to
> > setup the Debian sources (with the associated patching, etc.), made
> > things MUCH simpler and less error-prone than before.
> 
> Yes, though once I discovered the trick of using gcc-snapshot (bad
> idea, but it worked:-) I never had any problems patching the sources.
> It was just an annoyance to have to do it.

Well, for me it may have been the breaking factor. :-P  I suspect,
anyway. I never bothered to look deeper to find out what was breaking.
And now that gcc-4.8 is working, I'm not going back to figure out why it
didn't work before!


> >> With the above done, if I pull in any updates from GDC master, I
> >> can rebuild as follows:
> >>
> >>     cd $(GDCDIR)/dev
> >>     ./setup-gcc.sh --update ../gcc-4.8.1
> >>     cd ../objdir
> >>     make    [ still use -j as many processors as you can :-) ]
> > 
> > Thanks, this will come in handy when I need to update GDC.
> 
> Thank Iain, who told me about it :-)  Before that, I'd actually been
> deleting and re-unzipping the whole gcc-4.8.1 directory, meaning a
> complete rebuild every time.  Rebuilding GDC has recently become much
> quicker for me ... :-)
> 
> > Well, I have to thank you for posting these steps. I have given up
> > building GDC for a long time until I tried it again today with your
> > instructions. And it worked!
> 
> I know exactly the feeling, I also had a long period of thinking I'd
> never get it working.  I'm very happy these instructions were useful
> to you -- and I have to in turn thank the various people who helped me
> back then :-)

Well, now that I've successfully built gdc-4.8, I'm wondering if I
should work on getting it into the Debian repo? Or is somebody already
working on that? Iain?

(I realize it may not be quite as smooth as building from upstream
gcc-4.8, since I'll need to apply Debian-specific patches, etc., but at
least I have a working baseline to compare with when something goes
wrong, as opposed to completely shooting in the dark.) 


T

-- 
Obviously, some things aren't very obvious.