[distcc] libc5 support / gcc names (was Re: distcc 0.9, [patch])

[Martin Pool]

On  9 Sep 2002, Richard Zidlicky <rz at linux-m68k.org> wrote:

> I have compiled distcc on a m68k-linux-glibc2.2 system and on
> an old pentium with libc5. Compiling it on libc5 needed a few
> trivial patches because of missing features, appended. It could
> be done cleaner but creating configure tests for this seemed 
> a bit like an overkill ;)

Thanks, I merged something like them for 0.11. 

> Regarding Documentation: 
> The use of 'gcc -V' and similar is nowadays discouraged.

Discouraged by who?  Is that the official recommendation of the gcc
team?  (I don't disagree, I'm just curious.)  If so I might put a
pointer in the manual.

Anyhow, that's fine with me.  The next version of distcc will have a
$DISTCC_CC environment variable so that you can tell it what to use
for

  distcc -c hello.c

This falls down if you want to use implicit compiler names and call
different remote compilers for some reason.  For example, you might
want to use different C and C++ compilers from your Makefile.  That
might be addressed by argv[0] tricks (ln distcc ~/bin/m68k-linux-gcc),
but I don't want to do that unless it's really needed.

> Crosscompiling or compiling in a mixed environment is best done 
> by specifying the full compiler name, eg m68k-linux-gcc. This
> always works regardless whether it is native or crosscompiler.

The main problem with that approach is that those names are not
consistently present across machines.  For example, the most fully
specified name available for Debian's gcc 3.1 on my machine is
"gcc-3.1", not "gcc-3.1-x86".  (Perhaps I should file a bug?)  Also I
seem to recall seeing the arch and version values in different orders.

Obviously anyone who needs to cross compile can fix this up on their
machines but still it's a bit unfortunate.

> With gcc-3.2 it is also essential to use same version of binutils
> on all machines.

Could you elaborate so that I can add an FAQ or manual entry?

Thanks,

-- 
Martin