Re: Why Gnome RPMS need to work with RH 5.2

[Dean Elhard <dean-elhard home com>]

Eric Kidd wrote:
> 
[snip]
> Where can I find a detailed technical description of this issue? I've got to
> help two open-source projects work around this mess before people start
> shipping egcs as their default compiler.
> 
> And what happens if you compile glibc with egcs, by the way? Do all your
> GCC-compiled applications suddenly stop working?
> 
> > The other potential problem is that there were at one point
> > briefly other RPM's on the site (not from the Labs) compiled
> > with gcc; if you have a mixed set, you may have difficulties
> > that you can solve by upgrading the entire set with:
> 
> Gotcha. Please be exceptionally careful with Gtk+ 1.2; many of us have
> GCC-compiled applications on our system which link against it. Breaking
> these is simply *not* an option.
> 
> Cheers,
> Eric

My experience with this is not that the libraries are incompatible,
but that some of the headers configured on a system using egcs have
configuration defines which are specific to egcs, and will cause
subsequent compiles using those headers with gcc to fail.

What this boils down to is that the binraies should interoperate, but
if you try to do a source compile using gcc when certail libraries
have been configured using egcs, it won;t work.

An example is the glib libraries where the config header installed
with the library contains the line:
	#define VA_COPY __va_copy
which is not defines in gcc 2.7.2.x

Some of this is just a question of being careful to only include
config-dependent items in public headers which are tied to correct
calling of the public interface.  I haven't looked at the case I
mentioned to see if the interface is actually dependent on this
define, but I would guess that It isn't.

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