Hi
I downloaded the new version of binutils.

To my surprise, it doesn’t work any more, failing with a message that I should get the GMP package.

OK. Tried to download GMP. To my surprise, it isn’t a simple tar ball any more. To get the files you need to install a thing called « mercurial » first.

OK, tried to download « mercurial » since GMP can’t use git as almost everybody else does, or at least provide a git version. You have to get « mercurial ».

OK, that did work, and after typing « hg clone… etc » I got at last a version of GMP. There is no configure nor Makefile. You have to run a script called ".bootstrap ». Yes, with a dot as first character so « ls » doesn’t see it. 

The doc in GMP site says:
Once you have your own repository, you need to generate some build files. Perhaps the script .bootstrap works out-of-the box; if it doesn't, you need to install automake (at least version 1.11.6) and autoconf (at least version 2.59) and then try .bootstrap again. You may safely ignore the 4 lines of warnings from libtoolize.

Do not use autoreconf; it will overwrite config.guess which in turn will cause any builds to be awful.

OK, I started « .bootstrap » and obtained:
./.bootstrap: 7: autoreconf: not found
cp: cannot stat 'ltmain.sh': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove 'ltmain.sh': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat 'foo': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'ylwrap': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove 'ylwrap': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat 'foo': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'install-sh': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove 'install-sh': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat 'foo': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'missing': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove 'missing': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat 'foo': No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat 'test-driver': No such file or directory
rm: cannot remove 'test-driver': No such file or directory
mv: cannot stat 'foo': No such file or directory

I do not understand why they do not want us to use autoreconf and the first thing that THEIR script does is… to call « autoreconf ». Luckily it wasn’t found!
Now I have to download automake and autoconf. Just like that.

Why do I need to do all this just to compile binutils? Can’t this complexifying stop somewhere? Why binutils needs GMP now???
And if that is necessary, why can’t we get some version of GMP that ships with the source of binutils WITHOUT requiring that all users of binutils download mercurial, automake and autoconf???

Why can’t we keep things simple?

Here are the first 7 lines of the .bootstrap shell script
  1 #! /bin/sh                                                                              
  2 
  3 # We need to remove the "cache", else things are not regenerated properly
  4 rm -rf autom4te.cache
  5 
  6 # for warnings, add: -v -W all
  7 autoreconf -i -s

So, they tell people not to use autoreconf???

Well all this things aren’t important, just a decision (that is nowhere explained or justified) that makes everything more complicated for everyone.

Jacob