[Info-vax] Making the CRTL version dependency information useful

[Simon Clubley]

On 2018-01-16, Bill Gunshannon <bill.gunshannon at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/16/2018 08:21 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
>> 
>> I was never able to get an Ada compiler built for VMS Alpha using
>> the pure FSF sources. The compiler you refer to appears to be have
>> been built using the GNAT Pro compiler as the starting point which
>> is an option not available to me and would make the process
>> considerably easier and more viable.
>
> I started with GNAT from the first release from NYU.  The chain
> of development required that you use the previous release to
> build the next in the chain.  After ACT took it over the chain
> was broken and some of the missing versions were not made available.
> Thus, you need an Ada compiler to build the current Ada compiler.
> So much for the "protection" of IP provided by the GPL.
>

IIRC, a number of years ago the FSF told Adacore to fix the need to
build with the immediately previous version of GNAT.

Certainly, when building a native mode GNAT compiler these days there
can be quite a jump in version numbers between the current GNAT version
and the version you are building without any problems being encountered.

The current rule for building a cross compiled GNAT toolchain is that
you build a native version which is the same version as the cross
compiled version you want to build and then you build the cross compiler
using this newly built native compiler.

For various targets, this works just fine but fails with an internal
compiler error when building it for a VMS Alpha target.

I have no plans to look at this again in the future as I have a full
range of other projects to do instead.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
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