[Freemint-list] gcc 6.2 for Ataris brown edition

[Thorsten Otto]

On Thursday 29 December 2016 20:19:18 P W Slegg wrote:
> Are they many cases of using mint packages without having Mint running ? 

Every program for the Coldfire for example. Every library that does not use 
mint/posix features, like zlib, pnglib, jpeglib and lots of others. And i 
don't like the idea of not being able to compile programs for TOS anymore. 

>I think the real achievement is that gcc6 has been proved to create binaries 
>that can be run on mint and also that ELF can be converted and run.

Thats undoubtly an achievement. IMHO it is just the way it is achieved that 
took the wrong path. The linker (or at least the compiler driver) must be able 
to produce working executables, everything else would require mint-specific 
changes to each and every Makefile and/or configure script, and i doubt that 
such patches will be accepted by the upstream maintainers of those packages, 
essentially making any newer version of those packages unsupported on 
MiNT/TOS.