Re: Alternatives to gcc (was Re: gcc 4.3: when will it become standard compiler?)

On Tuesday 13 January 2009 23:08:06 Maxim Sobolev wrote:
> Brooks Davis wrote:
> > On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 05:04:21PM -0500, Eitan Adler wrote:
> >>> Smells like FUD to me. In all of my reading, I have never seen such a
> >>> claim. There may be some GPLv3 issues, but I seriously doubt this is
> >>> one.
> >>
> >> Which leads to my next question: why not upgrade?
> >
> > Given the number of FreeBSD using companies who are completely banned the
> > presence of GPLv3 source from their sites, improvements would have to
> > be extremely compelling and there would have to be a straight forward
> > way to produce snapshots of the src tree with out any GPLv3 components
> > as well as a simple way to build said source tree with a non-GPLv3
> > compiler.
>
> Crazy idea perhaps, but can we make gcc 4.3 (as well as other GPLv3
> components) an opt-in, just like we used to have crypto parts in the
> good old days when US was trying to limit export of this technology?
> Then can make both camps happy. Yes, it probably means that more efforts
> would be required to maintain it and keep code compatible with both
> versions, but since our current GPLv2 compiler is pretty much frozen it
> should not be much of the hassle as long as the initial work to support
> both versions have been done.
>
> -Maxim

	At the moment you can already compile gcc 4.3 from the ports tree, however 
things like binutils only seems to exist in the ports as a cross compiling 
tool. How hard would it be to add binutils as a port and make the gcc 4.x 
ports dependent on it? This way you can install gcc 4.3 with the assembler and 
linker that play nice together during the build? At the moment, I have had to 
make binutils from a gnu downloaded source and then make gcc 4.3 with a silly 
make, IE: make AS=/usr/local/bin/as ..........   

	Unless the makers of gcc 4.3 changed this, I had all sorts of compiling 
problems when a port was using g++ due to headers that were not included by 
default (that g++ 4.2 did). I would imagine there would be a lot of rework to 
do in the ports tree making it happy.

	Once you get a happy and stable 4.3 (and later) installed on your machine, 
its just a simple change in the make.conf to choose what compiler you want to 
use. 

	Would this approach get around the need to have 4.3 installed as a BSD 
default? 

Peg