[distcc] gcc versioning suggestion

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Nov 12, 2002, Martin Pool <mbp at samba.org> wrote:

> I've since been informed that it's better to use a different name for
> gcc, because -V doesn't work completely reliably.  I'm not sure of the
> exact reason.

The reason is that GCC used to use the same compiler driver and specs
file for multiple versions of gcc, under the assumption that the
interface of the actual compiler (cc1, cpp, etc) wouldn't change.
This assumption only held in very rare cases (in fact, in some cases
not only the command-line interface of the internal executables
changed, but even their names did!), so, in CVS versions of GCC, this
was reimplemented such that, when you run gcc -V <version>, it
re-execs ${0}-<version> or something like that, such that the compiler
driver of the specified version is used.  GCC's installer was adjusted
so that it installs itself with the -<version> suffix, but this
obviously doesn't affect older versions, so this will only work for
real after a couple of releases of GCC supporting this feature are out
there.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                 aoliva@{redhat.com, gcc.gnu.org}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        oliva@{lsd.ic.unicamp.br, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist                Professional serial bug killer