C.3 Recommended Tools for Compilation

We recommend installing the following GNU tools before attempting to build the GNU C library:

• GNU make 3.79 or newer

  You need the latest version of GNU make. Modifying the GNU C Library to work with other make programs would be so difficult that we recommend you port GNU make instead. Really. We recommend GNU make version 3.79. All earlier versions have severe bugs or lack features.

• GCC 3.4 or newer, GCC 4.1 recommended

  The GNU C library can only be compiled with the GNU C compiler family. For the 2.3 releases, GCC 3.2 or higher is required; GCC 3.4 is the compiler we advise to use for 2.3 versions. For the 2.4 release, GCC 3.4 or higher is required; as of this writing, GCC 4.1 is the compiler we advise to use for current versions. On certain machines including powerpc64, compilers prior to GCC 4.0 have bugs that prevent them compiling the C library code in the 2.4 release. On other machines, GCC 4.1 is required to build the C library with support for the correct long double type format; these include powerpc (32 bit), s390 and s390x.

  You can use whatever compiler you like to compile programs that use GNU libc, but be aware that both GCC 2.7 and 2.8 have bugs in their floating-point support that may be triggered by the math library.

  Check the FAQ for any special compiler issues on particular platforms.

• GNU binutils 2.15 or later

  You must use GNU binutils (as and ld) to build the GNU C library. No other assembler or linker has the necessary functionality at the moment.

• GNU texinfo 3.12f

  To correctly translate and install the Texinfo documentation you need this version of the texinfo package. Earlier versions do not understand all the tags used in the document, and the installation mechanism for the info files is not present or works differently.

• GNU awk 3.0, or higher

  Awk is used in several places to generate files. gawk 3.0 is known to work.

• Perl 5

  Perl is not required, but it is used if present to test the installation. We may decide to use it elsewhere in the future.

• GNU sed 3.02 or newer

  Sed is used in several places to generate files. Most scripts work with any version of sed. The known exception is the script po2test.sed in the intl subdirectory which is used to generate msgs.h for the test suite. This script works correctly only with GNU sed 3.02. If you like to run the test suite, you should definitely upgrade sed.

If you change any of the configure.in files you will also need

• GNU autoconf 2.53 or higher

and if you change any of the message translation files you will need

• GNU gettext 0.10.36 or later

You may also need these packages if you upgrade your source tree using patches, although we try to avoid this.