On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 03:42:31PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote: > On Sun, Jan 11, 2026 at 06:18:25PM +0100, Bruno Haible via Bug reports for > the GNU Texinfo documentation system wrote: > > On platforms where gcc (or clang) is not the native compiler, it can be > > impossible to build texinfo with gcc. > > I am not surprised (this is for makeinfo/texi2any only, not for the Info > reader). For Perl C and to have consistent link and compile flags, we > now use the Perl flags for all the libraries and executables. Therefore > it has become difficult to modify the flags or the compiler. Note, > however, that using a different compiler (and different flags) than the > one used to build Perl was not supposed to work since a long time, > according to Perl documentation, although it worked in practice on some > platforms.
I suppose it would still be possible to try building with different compiler flags if the user checks which Makefile variables are being used, and overrides them from the command line. For example, they can run make 'perl_conf_LIB_LDFLAGS=...' and so on. So it is not completely impossible to try to build with a different C compiler than that specified by "perl -V", just requires a lot of investigation into Makefile internals. I don't see a need at present to try to make this easier (e.g. by documenting perl_conf_LIB_LDFLAGS etc. as user-modifiable, alike to CC, CFLAGS etc.).
