Re: Host requirements to build the Tools binaries

[Lloyd Parkes <lloyd%must-have-coffee.gen.nz@localhost>]

On Sat, 2024-08-17 at 12:38 +1000, matthew green wrote:
> can you show me what fails for you?  it works on netbsd for:

It's the bsd_signal stuff and it's almost certainly only a problem on a
Linux host. 

Linux doesn't declare a lot of function without special preprocessor
symbols defined and GNU make overrides anything we might define by
defining _GNU_SOURCE in make.h. 

I spent quite a bit of time working through all the preprocessor
definitions tracking down where and why things get defined. I then took
GNU make 3.81 and untarred and built it on Linux. Or rather failed to
build it. It was a mind boggling endless stream of fail just trying to
build a plain old GNU make 3.81 on modern Linux with GCC 14.

GCC 14 just took the use of the undeclared function bsd_signal() in BSD
make and shot it down. 

I didn't try GCC 14 on any non-Linux platforms because GNU/Linux seems
to be the only platform that makes you "ask nicely" for function
declarations, which is the core problem I faced.

As a host tool GNU Make 4.4.1 is only used to build other tools and
isn't installed on the target system. As such, I checked that
"./build.sh tools" finished OK and then I washed my hands of GNU make.

This is not the first piece of GNU software that I seen fail to build
on leading edge GNU systems.

Ngā mihi,
Lloyd