[distcc] feature request: command-line switch to avoid using localhost

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Apr  5, 2003, Martin Pool <mbp at sourcefrog.net> wrote:

> Do we need to build stage1 remotely, or would it be enough to run the
> preprocessor and compiler stages separately for local compilations?

It doesn't matter how stage1 is built, it's not compared with
anything.  It's stage2 and stage3 that must be compiled under very
similar conditions, because they're compared, so that's where we must
not use localhost (because GCC won't generate the same debugging info
when compile a preprocessed file as it would compiling the original
file with the integrated preprocessor, and the preprocessor
maintainers don't want to agree this is a bug :-(

> Perhaps a DISTCC_SPLIT_LOCAL option would help?

I can't imagine what this option would do from its name.  Is it the
same as the command-line flag I've been asking for?  If so, I suppose
it would do just as well.

> I suppose that wouldn't fix the gcc pwd embedded in the binary, but I
> presume you either build without debugging or fix that some other way?

If distccd starts gcc from the same directory on all hosts in my build
farm, it works fine.  It's too bad that my patch to get the
preprocess-time pwd to make it to debugging info wasn't accepted
either :-(

> (Somebody said off the list that the pwd problem may be fixed in a
> future gcc release.)

I tried :-(

The preprocessor maintainers seem to be too focused on performance of
the integrated preprocessor to want to promote programs such as ccache
and distcc, that are built on the assumption that separate
preprocessing shouldn't alter the result of the compilation :-(

-- 
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