10.9. GCC-4.1.1

The GCC package contains the GNU compiler collection, which includes the C and C++ compilers.

10.9.1. Installation of GCC

The following patch fixes the searching of multilib dirs for specs file. The patch standardizes the gcc drivers path iteration functions, ensuring multilib directories are searched in the correct order. This fixes various issues, most noticably with libtool on multilib systems:

patch -Np1 -i ../gcc-4.1.1-PR20425-1.patch

Apply the following patch so that GCC links to /lib64 instead of /lib:

patch -Np1 -i ../gcc-4.1.1-pure64-1.patch

Apply a sed substitution that will suppress the installation of libiberty.a. The version of libiberty.a provided by Binutils will be used instead:

sed -i 's/install_to_$(INSTALL_DEST) //' libiberty/Makefile.in

GCC provides a gccbug script which detects at compile time whether mktemp is present, and hardcodes the result in a test. If mktemp is not found, the script will fall back to using less random names for temporary files. We will be installing mktemp later, so the following sed will simulate its presence:

sed -i 's/@have_mktemp_command@/yes/' gcc/gccbug.in

The GCC documentation recommends building GCC outside of the source directory in a dedicated build directory:

mkdir -v ../gcc-build
cd ../gcc-build

Prepare GCC for compilation:

../gcc-4.1.1/configure --prefix=/usr \
    --libexecdir=/usr/lib --enable-shared --enable-threads=posix \
    --enable-__cxa_atexit --enable-c99 --enable-long-long \
    --enable-clocale=gnu --enable-languages=c,c++ \
    --disable-multilib --disable-libstdcxx-pch

Compile the package:

make bootstrap
[Important]

Important

The test suite for GCC is considered critical. Do not skip it under any circumstance.

Test the results, but do not stop at errors:

make -k check

The -k flag is used to make the test suite run through to completion and not stop at the first failure. The GCC test suite is very comprehensive and is almost guaranteed to generate a few failures. To receive a summary of the test suite results, run:

../gcc-4.1.1/contrib/test_summary

For only the summaries, pipe the output through grep -A7 Summ.

A few unexpected failures cannot always be avoided. The GCC developers are usually aware of these issues, but have not resolved them yet.

Install the package:

make install

Some packages expect the C preprocessor to be installed in the /lib directory. To support those packages, create this symlink:

ln -sv ../usr/bin/cpp /lib

Many packages use the name cc to call the C compiler. To satisfy those packages, create a symlink:

ln -sv gcc /usr/bin/cc

10.9.2. Contents of GCC

Installed programs: c++, cc (link to gcc), cpp, g++, gcc, gccbug, and gcov
Installed libraries: libgcc.a, libgcc_eh.a, libgcc_s.so, libmudflap.[a,so], libmudflapth.[a,so], libstdc++.[a,so], and libsupc++.a

Short Descriptions

cc

The C compiler

cpp

The C preprocessor; it is used by the compiler to expand the #include, #define, and similar statements in the source files

c++

The C++ compiler

g++

The C++ compiler

gcc

The C compiler

gccbug

A shell script used to help create useful bug reports

gcov

A coverage testing tool; it is used to analyze programs to determine where optimizations will have the most effect

libgcc

Contains run-time support for gcc

libmudflap

The libmudflap libraries are used by GCC for instrumenting pointer and array dereferencing operations.

libstdc++

The standard C++ library

libsupc++

Provides supporting routines for the C++ programming language