Refresher on gcc port and the executables

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Sep 8, 2013, at 00:56, Tabitha McNerney wrote:

> I would suggest the MacPorts community should think about this and evaluate what options we may have should we want to wean ourselves off of the Apple developer tools.

As I wrote in May:

> On Thu, May 23, 2013 at 12:59 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> 
>> If you don't trust the compilers provided by Apple in Xcode, then you can't trust any compiler built by MacPorts, since MacPorts will build its compilers using a compiler from Xcode.

If you posit that Apple's compilers are tainted, then you must assume anything they produce is tainted as well.

Most any other compiler you find compiled for OS X will have been compiled using an Apple compiler. How else would it be done?

It's a rather chicken and egg problem. You can't compile unless you already have a compiler, so how do you compile the first compiler? Some solutions are here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping%5F%28compilers%29#The_chicken_and_egg_problem