maintenance of gcc cross ports

[Mark Millard]

James Shuriff james at opentech.cc wrote on
Sat May 18 12:29:22 UTC 2019 :

> The powerpc64-gcc port and all the ports that use it as a master (aarch64-gcc, aarch64-none-elf-gcc, amd64-gcc, arm-none-eabi-gcc, i386-gcc, mips-gcc, mips64-gcc, and sparc64-gcc) are very old and use buggy makefiles. I would like to take over maintenance of these ports. Powerpc64-gcc uses an old version of gcc and the makefile is buggy. Certain variables use bad regular expressions thus don't do what they're supposed to do. I've fixed up the makefiles and made new plists with a newer version of gcc.

Be aware that:

/[ports]/head/base/binutils depends on devel/binutils via:

MASTERDIR=	${.CURDIR}/../../devel/binutils

/[ports]/head/base/gcc depends on devel/powerpc64-gcc via:

EXTRA_PATCHES+= ${.CURDIR}/../../devel/powerpc64-gcc/files/freebsd-format-extensions
EXTRA_PATCHES+= ${.CURDIR}/../../devel/powerpc64-gcc/files/freebsd-libdir
EXTRA_PATCHES+= ${.CURDIR}/../../devel/powerpc64-gcc/files/patch-gcc-freebsd-mips

The maintainer is listed as: bapt at FreeBSD.org but
the activity tends to be jhb at FreeBSD.org . There are
other, more overall FreeBSD toolchain efforts that
these various ports are tied to. That may constrain
what can be done when. You would probably need to
consult with these folks about any changes.

I use these ports for doing alternate toolchain
buildworld buildkernel activities, including using, say,
devel/powerpc64-gcc on a powerpc64 machine to self host
with more modern tools than gcc 4.2.1 based ones.
As I understand, being in devel/ instead of lang/ for
gcc tools is tied to being constructed for the
system-building activities instead of for general use.

You might want to show your Makefile updates so that
that the problems are fully explicit.

===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)