On 20 June 2015 at 17:30, Edward Diener wrote: > I use both Windows and Linux. On Windows when using mingw or mingw-64 I > noticed that the search paths for include directories and lib directories > were hardcoded to c:\mingw. This fact makes it much harder to run multiple > versions of gcc on Windows. When I asked why absolute hardcoded paths were > used instead of relative paths to the gcc installation I was told this was > because gcc itself did it this way. > > So now I ask here. Why does gcc use hardcoded absolute paths to include and > lib directories when relative paths within a gcc installation would make gcc > much more portable and would make it much easier for multiple versions of > gcc to co-exist ? The only hardcoded ones are paths such as /usr/include and /usr/lib, all paths to GCC's own files should use relative paths. This might be a mingw limitation, it's not a GCC one.
