My glibc patch at http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=3004 was already turned down. As Drepper says there is nothing to argue about. Building glibc requires a binary called ‘readelf’ in the $PATH and in worst case this should support the target platform. To talk debianism this means you need to have binutils-multiarch installed to configure glibc correctly. Otherwise it will fail silently and misdiagnose the features of gcc. In our case this means glibc will not be able to detect that our gcc can generate .init and .finit sections which should be what __attribute__((constructor)) and __attribute__((destructor))__ creates and every gcc >= 3.4 creates properly.

On the other hand – besides one mysterious error – I have an ARM EABI gcc4.1/glibc2.4/binutils-2.17 toolchain running on my OSX. glibc-intermediate and glibc fail when compiling some bits that look like ‘iconv’ but a second run of make works just fine. This can be an issue of using -j2 and actually having two cores or other weird issues. I will try it once again and will try hard to identify the issue. Bunutils 2.17 needed one little patch. Somehow apple’s gcc4.1 thought that char stopc in read.c might be accessed unitiniliazed. I will need to send the patch upstream which means to get another bugzilla account for another GNU project…. I think it is time for a grand unified bugs.gnu.org…

On thursday I had fun building a Qt 2.3.12 with threading statically. The new and nice configure script of Qtopia2.2 loves to create funky Makefile rules. First it compiles the software using the src-mt rule and then it decides to cd src; make clean. Which will remove everytihg named .o or .tmp and finally everything called ../lib/libqt*. This means it builds the lib, ar’s it together then removes it and fails somewhere on the missing .tmp directory when continuing to rebuild… Anyway this error was mysterious and needed three people to look into. Oh well we had the resources for three engineers…. What does that show us? There are no autobuilds of Qt running for different configurations and options. Maybe we should ask Trolltech to contribute to our tinderbox to improve their internal processes. At the end we had a 6 o 7 MB large konqueror embedded running. I think we should get that size down a bit starting to utilize visibility options and such.

On a private note it looks like Al(exandra) and me will take different directions and have split-up. I think we will get along as really good friends but only the future will tell if we start to hate each other or get back together. I wish her good luck, success and pleasure with everything she ends up doing.