What's the reasoning behind using ld64 for gccXX?

[Sean Farley]

> What do you mean by that?  gcc 4.6 *WAS* using ld64 and still *IS* using ld64.  The difference is which ld64 is being used (the one from XCode or the one from MacPorts).  If some version of gcc has some issues with some version of ld64, that only supports the need to do this since we will now have control over the version of ld64 used.  The only place where ld64 wasn't being uses was Tiger, and with this change, now gccXX actually work on Tiger.

I meant the ld64 port.

> Huh?  This is just how MacPorts is done, and always has been.  This is why we provide all of X11 libraries instead of using the system ones, like fink.  I'm not sure what bugs you're asking for.

You wrote "This helps isolate bugs", to which I ask, "Which bugs?" My
point is that you're being unnecessarily pedantic here.

> I think you are misjudging "most users" ... I don't think "most users" actually give a hoot about the gcc ports or the clang ports.  They just care about wireshark, gimp, xchat, kde, or other such "user" applications.  gcc may be pulled in as a build dependency of some of those ports, and yeah, they'll need to build llvm for that.  If they don't like that, and they want to use as much of / as possible instead of ${prefix}, then there are certainly alternatives out there to explain to them why that is a bad idea...

You are missing the point. You are asking the user to now build *two*
compilers. MacPorts depends on Xcode and xcode provides ld64 (along
with a compiler sans fortran to compile said gcc port). The most
common case I've seen is a user that wants some kind of fortran
compiler.

> Do they test every possible version from every XCode released?  I doubt it, and even if they did, so what?  This keeps us more consistent across different OS and XCode versions and limits the scope of what *WE* must support.

Again, you're being overly pedantic and have not provided a valid
reason as of yet. Why even have Xcode as a requirement then if you're
not going to use it?