Re: should we ship linkable gmp/mpfr/mpc or hide them?

[kyuupichan <kyuupichan%zoho.com@localhost>]

---- On Sat, 16 Jul 2011 16:30:49 -0700 Alistair Crooks  wrote ---- 

>I'm against installing gmp in base (and all the others as well). The 
>fact that other packages use them is neither here nor there - it's a 
>matter for pkgsrc, not base - and the builtin recognition should just 
>dtrt with versions. Where I have problems is that nothing else needs 
>them in base, and I'm still unsure why a compiler needs 
>multi-precision arithmetic. To me, this is just bloat, is not 
>required, wanted, desired or even "might be nice if we had it". 

One area it is required, wanted and desired in any C compiler is
for decimal->binary conversions.

Previously GCC had bugs in this area, as it had limited precision
arithmetic, meaning that even conversion of decimal to float had
bugs.

My bug report:

   http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=21718

Of course, having decided to integrate GMP to fix the problem,
they now use it for all kinds of other compile-time transformations.

Neil.