There is no mismatch - just common sense. The same common sense which tells
me that whoever created gcc.spec need to have a good hard look at themselves
as the amount of flexibility which it gives to developers like myself is
grand total of zero, let alone that it does NOT do the job it is designed to
do - build GCC.
The job it's designed to do is build GCC RPMs *for Fedora* in order to
distribute RPMs for Fedora. It's not necessarily meant for end users
to rebuild packages that they can just install from a repo (because
we've already established you didn't really need to build from source
anyway, you just needed to install some additional packages - and in
fact building from source *still* doesn't do what you want - even more
reason to just install those additional packages and be done with it.)
Yes, it is true that I originally wanted to use GCC as a cross compiler
and because it did not work I set myself to build it from source to
correct that mistake. Later on it was established that GCC, supposedly,
should already function as a cross compiler which later on transpired
NOT to be the case as when I was installing the *Fedora-distributed* GCC
RPM all the i686 dependencies which enable GCC to function as a cross
compiler were not picked up and subsequently not installed. If they were
I won't be starting this thread in this mailing list.
Andrew said "But that's not what it's supposed to do. The 32-bit
libraries are built as part of the 32-bit distro."
IIUC to get the i686 packages you need to build on i686. Rightly or
wrongly, building on x86_64 gets you the 64bit packages, and the 32bit
ones come from a separate repo that was built for i686, on i686. (I
think the glibc rpm spec file might behave the same way.)
My point all along is that if I want to get GCC to function as a cross
compiler (its 'default' behaviour, as I've been told!) then I should be
able to run the spec file and end up with all the necessary GCC packages
allowing GCC to function as such. That is not the case!
You want the spec file to be useful for a different use case, which
while reasonable, may not be the use case the spec file was actually
written for. That doesn't mean the spec file is broken, it just means
your expectations don't match what the spec file was written to do.
The spec file IS broken as it does not build the necessary GCC packages
allowing GCC to function as a cross compiler - simple as that really.
