Re: My proposal for the libgcc runtime ABI (ia64 gcc/glibc is broken.)

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper at redhat dot com>]

Jeffrey A Law <law@cygnus.com> writes:

> What would you recommend then?  Considering that we can not tie GCC to glibc
> since GCC is used on a lot of systems that do not use glibc?

I don't really know what to do, I haven't spend much time thinking
about it.  Your comment above is exactly amplifying my fear: gcc
people cannot spend so many thoughts on one platform.  Naturally, I
don't blame you.

This is exactly why HJ suggested to leve the generation of the
libgcc.so to glibc or some additional new package.  If gcc provides
simply the libgcc with the interface(s) it currently supports the
creation of libgcc.so outside gcc (which therefore can have many more
demands on the environment like a ld which understands versioning) can

- add more legacy interface which are needed but are not supported
  anymore by gcc or which do some data rewriting before calling the
  actual libgcc functions

- create and install the actual libgcc.so with the appropriate soname


The alternative is to find somebody (or a group) for each of the
arch/OS combinations which care about compatibility at this level and
have them maintain the data inside gcc and to significantly extend the
build infrastructure to handle the soname and versioning requirements.

Everybody who just dismissed HJ's proposal should stop and think about
this for a moment.  Will you be willing to do what I described inside
gcc?


How this actually should be implemented is unclear to me.  It might be
that the solution is a small shell script and possibly a few more .c
files and create from the installed libgcc.a a .so file.  It's also
possible to pass a lot more information inside the libgcc.a file
(remember: this is an archive and not at all limited to .o files).  So
it would be possible to put into libgcc.a all the sources and some
kind of interface description.

This certainly requires some more discussion and somebody with time to
really think it through.  HJ already made a proposal so we need to
investigate it.

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