Re: question about linker

On 13.12.2024 18:42, David Brown wrote:

On 13/12/2024 18:26, Janis Papanagnou wrote:

On 13.12.2024 17:29, David Brown wrote:

>
(As an aside, who would ever compile gawk, other than the developers and
people building *nix distributions - who would all be using gcc or clang
for the job?  [...]

>
I'm a bit puzzled about that statement. - I certainly compile the
GNU Awk source from the tar-file whenever I get my hands on a new
version (including beta-test versions).

 
Okay, I guess that answers my question - there /are/ some people who
compile it from source on a regular basis.
 
But I suspect that for a tool like gawk, that would be rare - for most
people who use gawk, it usually makes little difference if they use a
version from last month or last century, so they will use whatever their
distribution provides.

Sorry, I cannot speak for "most people" since I have no idea how many
people, in the first place, are using it at all. I just know there's
a community of enthusiasts (myself included; so I'm biased).

Therefore I wouldn't make any assessment about users' habits.

My comment implied to be careful about such assessments. - You know
there's some people that would even write their own compiler if all
the existing ones don't please them. I think compiling a tool from
source - given how simple that is and how fast it can be done - is
by far more "normal" than that and not uncommon as far as I can see.

(I guess people who use source-based Linux
distros will compile it on their own machine, but they too will
generally use gcc or clang for that.)

Just to be clear; I'm not compiling all my Linux from scratch. It's
just a couple of specific packages or specific versions of packages
that I download as source and compile myself. - Beside the tools
where I want a quick access to them it's (for example) also tools
that aren't [officially or else] supported any more. The standard
incantations (configure/make/install) makes it simple - of course
only if that is supported by the respective tools; quality varies.

 
You are clearly far more of a gawk user than I am - do you think many
people actively (as distinct from, say, a general update on a
source-based Linux distro) download the source and compile it themselves?

Franky, I have no idea.

Janis