[Buildroot] buildroot gcc for target build fail

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Dear Nigel Sollars,

On Mon, 21 Jan 2013 08:19:22 -0500, Nigel Sollars wrote:

> After trying to build a more upto date buildroot I seemed to
> encounter this issue
> 
> --
> 
> checking whether to use setjmp/longjmp exceptions... unknown
> configure: error: unable to detect exception model
> make[2]: *** [configure-target-libgcc] Error 1
> make[2]: Leaving directory
> `/usr/local/buildroot-src/source/buildroot-2013.01/output/build/gcc-4.7.2-target'

Unfortunately, we have decided to deprecate the support for building a
toolchain for the target. We believe that in the context of Buildroot,
this is not necessary, and nobody was working on it to fix the problems.

The reasons we believe it is not necessary are:

 * Buildroot is generally used to build relatively small/simple
   systems, on which we generally don't do development on the target.
   If your system is so big and huge that you need to do development on
   the target, maybe a binary distributions like Debian or Ubuntu is
   more appropriate?

 * Buildroot is at its core a cross-compilation tool. So if you want to
   build libraries or applications for the target, what we recommend is
   to use the cross-compiler that Buildroot creates. It is very easy to
   create new packages in Buildroot, or even to build your own
   application outside of Buildroot, using the Buildroot cross-compiler.

In any case, I'm interested in understanding better your use case. The
support for building gcc on the target has been marked deprecated, but
not removed, for the very reason that we wanted to get feedback from
users of this feature, and see what are the use cases for it.

Thanks a lot,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, Free Electrons
Kernel, drivers, real-time and embedded Linux
development, consulting, training and support.
http://free-electrons.com