Re: How to build gnat on top of egcs-1.1.2, please?

[David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org>]

"David C. Hoos, Sr." wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Juergen Pfeifer wrote:
> >    -  Should we by default build packages based on egcs?
> 
> For the time being, I recommend the answer should clearly be: no.
The answer should probably be no. EGCS produces better C & FORTRAN, and
is far more C++ standard compliant than GCC 2.8.1. If you don't want to
mix versions, and Ada relibility is not very importatant, then go with
an EGCS solution.
 
> Egcs is also a
> quickly moving target, and Cygnus has already an internal not yet
> released new source tree that is very different from the currently
> published source.

In article <7g3klg$26p$1@rtl.cygnus.com> on gnu.misc.discuss &
comp.lang.ada, on 04/26/1999 Per Bothner <bothner@cygnus.com> wrote
> 
> Well, I can't think of a single Gcc feature, major or otherwise,
> that was in our standard customer release before being in EGCS.
> Note:  I am talking about the standard GNUPro product;  not
> contracted deliverables made to a specific customer.  (Obviously,
> if somebody pays for a new port to an unannounced chip, we are
> not going to put into Egcs before it is announced!)  But in
> general, customers do *not* get major features before Egcs.
> 
> Since we merge *from* Egcs to our internal tree, rather than
> vice versa, the check-in policy at Cygnus is:  Nothing gets
> into our internal tree unless it is in Egcs *or* specially
> marked as being Cygnus only or "sanitized".  That should make
> it obvious that the default is to check things into Egcs
> first or at the same time.

Unless Cygnus is openly lying about the matter, I'd say this myth is
clearly false.
> 
> There is nothing wrong with experimenting with building gnat on egcs,
> but the result should be treated with extreme care and should NOT be
> what we should offer to inexperienced new users as an easy to use
> package.
Why not easy to use? It's easy to use as GCC 2.8.1, and much easier if
you're trying to mix versions. 

> Egcs is an *experimental* compiler and they really mean it this
> way. 
Experimental in method (bazaar), not in style. It is replacing GCC as
the GNU compiler, so it's obvious RMS considers it a successful
experiment.

> Gcc 2.8 is a pretty damn good code generator already and egcs does not seem
> to contain any Ada-specific code generator improvements.
That's part of the point of a common backend, that you don't need to
make many Ada-specific code generator improvements.