Re: [tlug] Apple vs. FSF and gcc 4.2.1

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Darren Cook writes:

 > So, what you're saying is that later versions of gcc could be made to
 > work on Macs, it just needs someone to bother to work on it?

I *know* that gcc 4.5 from MacPorts works and I believe that gcc 4.6
does, but you may be limited to more recent Macs (eg, I bet they don't
work very well on PPC with "Tiger" anymore, and I've had problems
building 4.3 and 4.4 on Intel with "Leopard").

The problem is that the "straight from GNU" versions of GCC don't
support the options needed to create "fat" (multiple platform)
binaries, while the Apple versions do.  This wouldn't be a big deal,
except that a lot of projects do expect an Apple compiler and the
build scripts and Makefiles assume that the compiler will accept a
platform option.  Boom! there goes your MacPorts build.

It's usually tedious but not hard to work around this in an
autoconstipated project -- just sed the offensive options in the
Makefiles into oblivion -- but I don't know how to do it in cmake
project; the knowledge about Apple compilers is something deep in the
cmake stuff and you can't simply run sed on the Makefiles before
running make since there aren't any in cmake.

 > Does it need Apple to be involved, or could anyone do it?

No and yes.  But nobody but Apple cares AFAIK.