"Bradley D. LaRonde" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > What kinds of things do you see this compiler being used for at this point?
Probably it's first goal will be to obsolete itself. GCC 2.95.1, with Jay Carlson's 9916 patches, is up to stage 1, and the stage 1 compiler seems as though it's working on stage 2. In the medium term, I had lots of problems getting various packages to configure themselves for cross-compilation. Most egregious was ncurses, which I desperately wanted to get better feedback off the console, but I also had trouble with diff, bison, gmake, and gawk. The configuration procedure simply breaks down at some point when unable to run test programs. Eventually, supposing that the differences in architecture are probably generally outweighed by the differences in operating system, I ran configure natively on the host, and then hacked configure to make it get the right answer and stop exit()ing. With a native compiler and build environment accessible to the target over NFS, the configure script can be run natively on the target, allowing the developer to let autoconf discover dependencies and architectural differences more accurately, regardless of whether the eventual build is done with the native compiler or with a cross on a faster host. I also have longer-term dreams of porting dpkg, Debian's package manager, which would allow us to contribute and share our work more effectively with the debian-mips effort. It might also be helpful for package management and synchronization of software installation between a host computer and the H/PsPC. Besides, I want perl :) -- Robert Coie Implementor, Apropos Ltd.
