On 20.12.2010 18:35, Mark Mitchell wrote:
On 12/20/2010 9:01 AM, Ulrich Weigand wrote:
Well, I understand we -as Linaro- would like to see Ubuntu base their compiler on ours, but Ubuntu prefers to use a single source base for the compiler for all their supported platforms, including SPU. If we break some of those other platforms in the Linaro compiler, that just creates extra problems for Ubuntu ...
I certainly understand that desire; I'm just asking how sustainable it is and where the commitments ought to lie. I'd just guess that this would be an ongoing problem, and that there will be a tension between "make the best possible ARM Linux system" and "don't break other architectures".
So, I'll build without Linaro on powerpc. Next we'll see regressions on ix86 and x86_64, which are not fixed, so stop building these architectures without the Linaro changes? Or build without Linaro on ix86 and x86_64? Or maybe be a bit more conservative what gets into the Linaro toolchain? From my point of view there are some changes in Linaro which are just imported by convenience, not necessity.
IMO the Linaro GCC benefits that it is used to build code on other architectures besides ARM. The chances to detect non-architecture specific bugs are much bigger, because the developer/user basis is still bigger; it is not impossible, but it is likely that you need to add extra QA efforts for e.g. Ubuntu on ARM.
So it's maybe unfortunate that Ubuntu does use the Linaro GCC on such a large code basis, which nobody else seems to do ;-)
Matthias