Re: Bootstrapping pkgsrc with a compiler

[Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost>]

> On Jul 2, 2020, at 1:11 PM, Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2 Jul 2020 at 19:42, Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost> wrote:
> >
> > I have experimented a bit with bootstrapping pkgsrc with a compiler intended to be used to build the rest of pkgsrc.  At least on some systems I have found that to be a huge help and am wondering if we should be moving toward enabling support for that.  One use case is that on certain systems the native compiler is inadequate.  In that case it is much easier to bootstrap pkgsrc with a compiler than to bootstrap it without one, install a compiler, and then rearrange the setup to allow building everything else with the new compiler.
> 
> How do you bootstrap pkgsrc without a native compiler?

Sorry if I was unclear.  Of course, you cannot bootstrap pkgsrc without a native compiler.  I’m sorry if I implied that.

However, I encounter systems in which the native compiler is inadequate for general use and will not reliably compile all of pkgsrc.  It is also the case that one might wish to use a different, pkgsrc-supplied, compiler even if the native one is adequate.

In those cases, it is necessary to bootstrap pkgsrc, build a pkgsrc compiler with the native compiler, then reset things like mk.conf to direct pkgsrc to use the new compiler for the remainder.

I am raising the possibility that those steps could be combined into a bootstrap with compiler step, followed by normal use of pkgsrc, which would have been already configured in the first step to use the bootstrapped compiler.  I feel this would make using non-native compilers with pkgsrc, a definite need in some cases, much more feasible.

Cheers,
Brook