Richard Earnshaw wrote:
I think there's a very important distinction that needs to be drawn between a tool that needs to be installed to *build* gcc and a tool that needs to be installed in order to *run* gcc. GMP/MPFR is needed for the latter; and to date we have never relied on such an external component that isn't part of the base installation of a system (such as libc).
True, and I agree that this is a substantial distinction. However, I don't think we should distribute even libraries required to run GCC as part of GCC itself. Of course, I have no objection to putting known-good source tarballs for such libraries somewhere readily available, etc. But, I think the GCC distribution should not directly contain these.
It's true that if you link the compiler itself against a shared library, you have to either set the dynamic search patch, link statically, or require users set LD_LIBRARY_PATH -- but you have to do that regardless of whether or not the libraries are part of the GCC source distribution.
As to zlib and intl, if I had my way I'd remove them. However, I understand that we have various entanglements (as Daniel mentions) that may prevent that. I certainly don't think removing zlib from our repository is the most important improvement we can make to GCC. :-) But, I do think we should resist incorporating more external components into the GCC repository and into its own build process.
-- Mark Mitchell CodeSourcery [EMAIL PROTECTED] (650) 331-3385 x713
