Background to this dismaying discovery: I'm attempting to find a minimally painful way to bootstrap a 20-year-old Power Mac G5 into some semblance of a modern toolchain. Out of the box, it comes with GCC 4.2.1 and an amazingly primitive Apple version of as. I can readily build a less-ancient GCC (e.g. GCC 6 and 7 each sit at a comfortable distance from both "can't be compiled" and "can't compile anything"), but I was hoping to be able to bootstrap gas along with it (among other reasons, Macs generally expect to be able to cross-compile for whatever architecture Apple is migrating to or from at the time, so building GCC is properly done by building a native GCC and also at least one cross-compiling GCC; in this case ppc[64] → (i686/x86-64), and possibly also ppc[64] → aarch64, if I want to get overenthusiastic). This and similar software combinations can of course be constructed piecemeal, but ideally a package-manager recipe would do it all in one shot. (Admittedly it will be one _very drawn out_ shot, but the key point is the user shouldn't need to hold it by the hand until it finishes.)
I am not enormously familiar with the mechanics of thread-local storage, but I get the impression that optionally doing without it would be next to impossible given the way that bfd.c is written. Should the ./configure script be throwing up an error and refusing to proceed if TLS is not available? I don't know what the project's design philosophy is here. Sincerely, Gordon Steemson PS: if anyone answers this, please also CC me directly – I do not necessarily have reliable access to the mailing list. -- The world’s only gsteemso
