Linux without the GNU toolchain 5110

Mark South

Sure. BUT YOU WOULD HAVE TO BE CRAZY.

Would you like to write all the GNU stuff (from alocal, addr2line, ..., zless, zmore, znew, and all the libraries, such as glibc, etc.) over from scratch? Then test it thoroughly? Lemme tell you, it would be a major undertaking requiring man-years of work. I know because I was in a group that was responsable for doing just the compilation system for one version of the UNIX OS. It took many months just to do libm.a over, selecting the best algorithms, making it SVID and IEEE compatible, etc. Questions such as what to do when you have a more accurate algorithm than the SVID has, so your more accurate answers cause you to fail the SVID test suite... would have to be answered. And this is just for the libm.a library. Then the compilers and optimizers... . It took two of us a man-year or two just to upgrade the optimizer to meet new requirements and thoroughly test it (one of the more amusing requirements was to recompile and optimize the UNIX kernel using a recompiled and optimized compilation system). Add in all the others... .

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 09:20:00 up 4 days, 7:41, 3 users, load average: 4.26, 4.27, 4.27