metaquestion

[Paul Theodoropoulos <paul at anastrophe dot com>]

Forgive me a question that may be born of some serious ignorance. I'm not a 
programmer, I'm an administrator and thus the great extent of my knowledge 
lies in 'configure' and 'make'. ;^)

my question has to do with chicken-and-egg.

i built gcc 3.2.2 originally using my existing binutils 2.12 installation. 
I then built binutils 2.13.2. here are some relevant file sizes:

-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      890328 Mar 29 18:03 /usr/local/bin/ld*
-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      848974 Mar 29 18:02 /usr/local/bin/as*

i then rebuilt gcc 3.2.2 with the new 2.13.2 binutils installation. here's 
gcc's filesize (i didn't make note of the previous gcc's size)

-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      200264 Mar 29 19:40 /usr/local/bin/gcc*

then, i rebuilt binutils 2.13.2 using the new gcc that was built with the 
previous binutils 2.13.2 (above). more filesizes:

-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      889336 Mar 29 22:01 /usr/local/bin/ld*
-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      853302 Mar 29 22:00 /usr/local/bin/as*

then I rebuilt gcc 3.2.2 with the just noted new binutils 2.13.2.

-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      202169 Mar 30 09:51 /usr/local/bin/gcc*

i'm sure you can see where i'm going with this. here's the next rebuild of 
binutils 2.13.2:

-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      889336 Mar 30 11:59 /usr/local/bin/ld*
-rwxr-xr-x    2 root     other      853302 Mar 30 11:58 /usr/local/bin/as*

i didn't do a diff between the last and latest builds, but i presume the 
binaries are identical at this point.

for general reference, this is all on a sun sparc 20, dual SM71's, 224M 
ram, solaris 9.

aside from probably wasting some free time, did anything of any value take 
place here? did anything truly get 'optimized' or function more efficiently 
after this little recursion of builds?

like i said, a 'meta' question.

Paul Theodoropoulos
http://www.anastrophe.com
http://folding.stanford.edu
The Nicest Misanthrope on the Net