Re: GCC language front-ends

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

Andreas Enge <andreas@enge.fr> skribis:

> On Wed, Jun 04, 2014 at 11:34:33PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:

[...]

>> > Also, maybe we could drop one of the three gcc versions.
>> The default package does C and C++.  We could imagine another one that
>> would in addition to Objective-C and FORTRAN, yes.  That would save
>> build time, at the expense of being somewhat confusing to the user IMO.
>
> Sorry, here I meant the version numbers 4.7.3, 4.8.2 and 4.9.0. Maybe we could
> drop 4.7.0?

Eventually yes, but for now I think it may still be useful to have 4.7
around (for instance, as a developer it’s sometimes useful to test with
older compilers.)

>> One of the GCC 4.8.2 is ‘gcc-final’ in base.scm.
>
> So this is the one that is used for compiling all our packages?

Yes.

> Could we then not drop the gcc-4.8.2 from gcc.scm and let the user
> install gcc-final?  Or otherwise, give it a different NAME?

It’s been discussed several times, but there’s no satisfactory solution
so far.  Changing the name seems like a bad idea, because it’s really
gcc.  Making either gcc-final or gcc-4.8 private isn’t an option because
they’re referred from elsewhere.

Maybe package objects should have an extra property that says whether
they should be hidden?

>> > Is there a way of printing not the line 95 in which the base gcc package is
>> > defined from which all others inherit, but the line where the actual package
>> > is defined?
>> Yes, good idea.
>> I’ve just committed this patch:
>
> Hm, I meant in all generality for all packages that are inherited. Would
> this be easily possible?

Hmm, define-record-type* could be augmented with an inheritable? flag,
and the ‘location’ field would be marked as non-inheritable, something
like that.

Ludo’.