Re: [MiNT] What's in, what's out?

[Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de>]

On Fri, Nov 26, 1999 at 07:35:47AM +0200, Martin-Eric Racine wrote:
> On 25.11.1999, Guido Flohr <gufl0000@stud.uni-sb.de> wrote:
> 
> > Source-compatibility is a very important issue for me.  
> 
> Me too, but not at the expense of breaking documented features.

Yeah! Good point! Which features?

> > My goal is that everybody installs a C compiler because this
> > is a vital part of every operating system, but users will
> > only accept that if it is really unproblematic to install the
> > required tools and libraries.  
> 
> ...and if they work.
> 
> Currently, the lib produces broken binaries that die with a
> bus error, even with an indecently huge malloc in the header,
> most of the time.  Only really simple apps work.

Please never ask me again for developer sources.  You have downloaded a
developer source tree that contained a bug, you weren't able to fix that
bug and now you have a library that produces broken binaries.  Correct.

But either get the knowledge to fix such bugs or keep your hands off
developer versions.

Remember my words: "One of these two patches *may* work".

> Two problems:  that GCC is compiled to use libgnu by default, and
> it doesn't seem to have /usr/lib in its default path; I have to
> declare LIBGNU in my environment, before it found the specs.

Read the gcc docs and you find out where gcc looks for the spec file.

> Also, I cannot use 2.91 (it really is EGCS), because it reports
> -mbaserel as an illegal option.  2.8.1 doesn't mind baserel, but
> it won't work half of the time because whichever lib we need to
> link against (e.g. ncurses, zlib, etc.) was only ported as basic.

How many times do we have to repeat that egcs or later gcc versions have
no support for -mbaserel?

If you want other libs like ncurses, zlib etc. as a -mbaserel version,
download the sources and compile it yourself.  These libs are useless in
99 % of the cases as mbaserel, that's why they are not distributed by
default.

The few programs for which it makes any sense to build them -mbaserel
mostly don't need these libs.  These few programs are: shells, make,
inetd, other daemons that fork a lot (e. g. apache).  All other programs
will actually get bigger and slower by building them -mbaserel.

mbaserel has only one effect: The text segment is shared on fork(). But if
your program forks and then execs another image you win nothing.  The fork
is a little faster but that is eaten up by the base-relative addressing.

Ciao

Guido
-- 
http://stud.uni-sb.de/~gufl0000/
mailto:guido@atari.org