Re: Libtool 1.5 on MacOS X

[Bill Northcott]

> >> Because of the way things are set up, adding fsf gcc support is
> >> essentially adding a completely different compiler. Depending on my
> >> available free time, I may decide to revisit this issue, do you
> >> really think it is required?
> >
> > With stock GCC 3.3, most if not all of the Apple-like command line
> > options are processed just as they are on the compiler distributed by
> > Apple.  Take a look at the sources and you'll see there are hooks for
> > this.  For libtool 1.5, treating stock GCC 3.3 like Apple's GCC works
> > for me to generate dynamic libraries and executables.
> >

> I just did have a quick peek at the sources, looks like you are indeed
> correct. I will submit a patch to the list tomorrow. To excuse myself
> here, almost none of these flags were passed through by the gcc-3.2 fsf
> gcc which was available when I first looked at this issue.

Firstly:
Fixing the libtool.m4 macros allowed our project to build on MacOS X using 
an FSF gcc3.3 compiler.

Secondly:
I would like to second Marcus' comments that the differences between an 
Apple compiler and an FSF compiler built on MacOS X are very small.  The 
big difference is the compiler file layout.  See the link below for a 
complete listing of Apple compiler options which highlights the ones not 
supported on the FSF version. 
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/DeveloperTools/gcc3/gcc/Option-Summary.html#Option%20Summary
They involve Apple specific issues such as kext support, Apple ld/dyld 
support, Pascal strings, pre-compiled headers, Altivec and a couple of 
Apple legacy compatability things.  All of these seem to me to be unlikely 
to be an issue for cross platform code that wants to use libtool or the 
FSF compiler.  I think the FSF compiler is supposed to support Altivec 
real soon now.

As far as I can see, there is only one issue which prevents our project 
building with an Apple compiler.  This is that the Apple compilers crash 
trying to compile a main() function with the -fgnu-runtime flag.

Bill Northcott