Comment 21 for bug 1266492

On Wed, 13 Nov 2013, bugdal at aerifal dot cx wrote:

> Joseph, the bootstrapping issue can presumably be fixed (and bootstrapping made
> easier) simply by providing a way to install headers without building glibc.

There already is. But to install the correct set of headers (some
generated at build time) you first need an appropriately configured
compiler to configure glibc. That's the old three-compiler bootstrap
process: first build a basic compiler, then install headers with it and
crt*.o and build a dummy libc.so, then build a second compiler with shared
libgcc, then build glibc, then build a third compiler. I changed things
in glibc and GCC so that a two-compiler process suffices: the initial
compiler built without headers can build glibc and the result is identical
to what you get if you repeatedly alternate GCC and glibc builds.
(Ideally you'd have a one-compiler process, where the second compiler
build only builds/rebuilds GCC's runtime libraries where they depend on
system headers or shared glibc, not GCC itself.)