On 21 Jul 2003, James Emerton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm currently drooling over distcc. I'm going to try and implement it > on top of MinGW, maybe I'll even try cross compiling on a Linux host. > (Yes, sadly I'm writing Windows software for a living) > > I had an idea about one of your pie-in-the-sky features, versioning > compilers. The problem, of course, with different compilers is that > they don't produce compatible object code. I was thinking that if you > distributed a small test case, and build it with each available > compiler on the system. Then you hash the resulting object code and > voila, sort of a psudo test case.
There's a start towards that in 'distcc-check' in CVS. However for a couple of reasons you might get false failures: firstly gcc will often do that because of the -g problem (see the website). Even without that, people might have sightly different patchlevels of compilers that are completely compatible but that do not generate the exact same binary code. It may be that checking that the program links (and runs?) is more useful than testing for binary equality. Secondly you might get false successes: it's conceivable (perhaps unlikely) that two versions of gcc would generate the same code for a simple hello world, but incompatible code for say something in C++, or something using varargs or a particular standard library function. So I think there would need to be a battery of tests that check different things that are known to be incompatible. Also the user needs to specify which compiler they want to test. It's not necessarily 'gcc'. Unfortunately all of this is probably too expensive to be done completely transparently. Also, there is no straightforward way for distcc to find the version of the compiler it wants. But I think we can at least give people a quick sanity check that everything is installed properly. > Of course, I could be way way off...but I thought it has potential. > > James -- Martin __ distcc mailing list http://distcc.samba.org/ To unsubscribe or change options: http://lists.samba.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/distcc
