2014-10-16 20:55 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton:
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 6:37 PM, Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo
A difficult part that I see is if GCC cannot generate code for this architecture. I think that many packages expect to be compiled in GCC, and if they are libraries or important pieces of infrastructure, they will block packages depending on them. Even if it's a tiny percentage, there are more than 10K source packages in Debian nowadays, so it's not a minor task.
there's always a way round that: a package that "pretends" it is gcc (i think it is something like "Provides")
Yes, there are several ways to achieve that... but I meant that maybe some projects will only compile with GCC (or run properly if compiled with GCC), because they assume quirks in implementation, invalid syntax in language standards but valid in GCC, and things like that. Like the reasons why Linux kernel does not compile with LLVM. I think that many projects might have similar problems if the compiler is not GCC.
E.g., even after years of efforts getting the archive compiled with Clang:
"22202 packages have been rebuild. Among them, 1261 (5.7 %) failed."
I suspect that the numbers if using open64 compiler will be much worse.
-- Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo manuel.montezelo@gmail.com