Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Re: About porting of GCC and possible redundancy

[Tony Theodore]

On 26 April 2010 17:31, Kārlis Repsons <address@hidden> wrote:
> On Sunday 25 April 2010 21:45:09 Volker Grabsch wrote:
>> The official MinGW project does not only support GCC 3.4.5. It also
>>  supports GCC 4.4.0, and since a few days GCC 4.5.0.
> A bit funny: there are people, who can port GCC, but there are no people, who
> can package it within the project... If I get it right. Well, that was for
> cross-compile on Linux...

Depends on what you mean by package, there are binaries available that
can probably just be unpacked in MSys or even used with a different
build system on windows (say python distutils).

I think that, historically, the mingw project spent a lot of time in
packaging at the expense of keeping up to date with the core
compilers. It's good to see that they've been able to achieve a very
timely release of GCC 4.5.

>> However, for historical reasons, mingw-cross-env uses mingwrt and w32api
>> from MinGW, but the GCC from TDM, a small fork of MinGW.
> So MinGW and TDM (sorry, I see for first time, who are they?) have some
> parallel efforts on GCC? Why don't they just cooperate to produce one, if you
> have some idea?

Volker already mentioned that the TDM releases were motivated by
providing support for the 4.x series. Think of it as an experimental
branch (which is what it initially was).

>> Also note that patches from MinGW wander
>> back to the GCC project, so some GCC versions seem to be usable for
>> win32 cross compiling without any extra patches of the MinGW project,
>> because those are already included. However, we haven't yet checked in
>> how far that really works.
> Is it supposed, that in time the original GCC will support cross-compiling to
> some platforms and just their runtime environments and APIs will need to be
> installed?

That has been a focus of the Mingw-w64 team, and it seems MinGW.org
also. From the Mingw GCC 4.5 release notes:

    GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection, a fairly portable optimizing
    compiler.

    This MinGW port generates code for 32-bit versions of Windows, and should
    run on any 32- or 64-bit Windows operating system.

    No local patches were used.

    Local customizations were limited to:
    * Specific command-line options for configure and make,
    * moving a few files after "make install",
    * replacing redundant executables by a wrapper.
    For details, see the build script.


>> BTW, in addition to GCC/mingwrt/w32api there is a fourth important
>> package: Binutils.
> ..
>> So when we
>> speak about porting, Binutils is a non-issue.
> Just still curious: how much work there currently is just to port GCC and why
> (basically) it has to be done?

Well, the MinGW.org project has been going for over ten years, and
this (to my limited knowledge) is the first release without any
patches. It may be that splitting up the effort over different
projects allowed each to focus on their own goals and ultimately move
all forward.

Regards,

Tony