Re: Problem building GDB on Power64

[Andrew Cagney <cagney@gnu.org>]

>>> PS:  I'm not asking for someone to post patches to configure.in or what ever, 
>>> (hinting maybe), but I am asking for some pointers on where to look.
> 
> 
> This would be very tricky to do.  GDB links to libraries built in the
> same tree, so nothing in gdb/configure.in would work.  It would have to
> be in the top level, which is shared with binutils and gcc and so on. 
> You don't want them to default to being 64-bit apps, because they
> should obey the system policy of defaulting to 32-bit.
> 
> I really think this is your responsibility when building GDB if you
> want it to support 64-bit binaries.

Exactly.

GDB's build behavior is determined by policies set by autotools, config 
and <top-level>.  GDB isn't in a position to vary this locally. 
Perhaphs the thing to do is rase this on GCC (where I'd guess the 
<top-level> aspect should be discussed).

BTW, I did once ask to the config maintainer (BJE@ibm) if config.guess 
could look at the compiler.  That way, instead of:
	$ CC='cc -m64' config.guess
	powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu
it would return:
	$ CC='cc -m64' config.guess
	powerpc64-unknown-linux-gnu
and that in turn would let us specify:
	$ CC='cc -m64' .../configure
Ben didn't agree (I don't remember why).

Andrew