Re: (Doc ping [for news and manual]) -- [PATCH 14/14] the "compile" command

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz at gnu dot org>]

> Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2014 21:59:44 +0300
> From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
> Cc: pmuldoon@redhat.com, gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> 
> > From: Tom Tromey <tromey@redhat.com>
> > Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>, gdb-patches@sourceware.org
> > Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2014 08:42:34 -0600
> > 
> > Eli> That's not what I meant.  Suppose I have 2 compilers installed, one
> > Eli> called 'gcc', the other 'gcc472'.  (They could also be in different
> > Eli> directories, even not on PATH.)  The program I'm debugging was
> > Eli> compiled with gcc472.  How will GDB know to invoke that executable?
> > Eli> Also, how would it know the command-line arguments required to produce
> > Eli> a code that will work well with the rest of the program being debugged
> > Eli> (the code I compile can call functions in the program, right?)?
> > 
> > Phil> Tom could maybe answer this better.  There was recent work on the GCC
> > Phil> triplet and PATH searching over on GCC for the plugin.
> > 
> > Yes, the new version searches the path for something matching the
> > correct GNU configury triplet.
> 
> But the triplet is not enough, I could have more than one compiler
> installed for the same triplet.
> 
> Besides, can we reliably assume that there's a compiler whose name
> matches the triplet?  On my MinGW installation of GCC, I don't have
> i686-pc-minwg32-gcc anywhere.

To make my comments more practical, I think this feature will be much
more useful if it includes user options or other facilities through
which the user could specify the compiler to invoke.  (I see there's
already a provision for specifying compilation switches.)

Thanks.