Getting GCC from SourceForge

[Guest]

Hi,

I'm trying to acquire GCC to use under Windows, and to do that I need
either Cygwin or MinGW from SourceForge. However, when I access
www.sourceforge.net, I am confronted with a choice of "Candidate,
Current, Previous, Proposed, Snapshot".

Can somebody please tell me:

1.) What "Candidate", "Proposed", and "Snapshot" mean in this context?

2.) Which of the Candidate, Current, and Previous versions is the best
choice to download and install?

3.) How fully tested/debugged are Candidate and Propsed downloads?

4.) How do I add another compiler to the GCC after it's installed?
I'll need to know this when GNU Fortran and Pascal are ready (as also
GNU Cobol many years from now)

5.) Do GNU C and C++ deviate from the ANSI standard in any way?

Thanks,

James McLaughlin.

 

[Ronald Landheer-Cieslak]

I'm trying to acquire GCC to use under Windows, and to do that I need
either Cygwin or MinGW from SourceForge. However, when I access
www.sourceforge.net, I am confronted with a choice of "Candidate,
Current, Previous, Proposed, Snapshot".

Cygwin would be at cygwin.com, not sourceforge..

Can somebody please tell me:

1.) What "Candidate", "Proposed", and "Snapshot" mean in this context?

You can get that information at http://mingw.org/download.shtml

2.) Which of the Candidate, Current, and Previous versions is the best
choice to download and install?

Safest would be current..

3.) How fully tested/debugged are Candidate and Propsed downloads?

Pretty well

4.) How do I add another compiler to the GCC after it's installed?
I'll need to know this when GNU Fortran and Pascal are ready (as also
GNU Cobol many years from now)

http://mingw.org/download.shtml, again

5.) Do GNU C and C++ deviate from the ANSI standard in any way?

Yes, many ways - many extentions are offered. See http://gcc.gnu.org for
that.

Seriously, most of the infor you're looking for is on their website and
has nothing to do with ISO C++ - and hence is off-topic here. Have a
look at http://mingw.org/lists.shtml to know where to ask questions, and
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html to know how to.

rlc

 

[Guest]

1.) What "Candidate", "Proposed", and "Snapshot" mean in this context?

You can get that information at http://mingw.org/download.shtml

Um, actually that information's not there.

Safest would be current..

Thank you.

Pretty well

Uh, you say "Pretty well", but is that smiley meant to imply
otherwise?

http://mingw.org/download.shtml, again

Is this the bit that says "Updated versions of individual packages
will sometimes be made available in between releases of the main MinGW
distribution... in most cases it should be possible to extract a
package's content into your MinGW directory to take advantage of the
updates immediately"?

 

[Ronald Landheer-Cieslak]

Um, actually that information's not there.

Hmm.. in that case you should probably ask the MinGW people directly..

Uh, you say "Pretty well", but is that smiley meant to imply
otherwise?

Nope - the smiley was meant to imply that I'm pretty happy with the
state of affairs at MinGW, as far as quality is concerned

Is this the bit that says "Updated versions of individual packages
will sometimes be made available in between releases of the main MinGW
distribution... in most cases it should be possible to extract a
package's content into your MinGW directory to take advantage of the
updates immediately"?

Basically, in MinGW, you can simply unroll the programs and they pretty
much work without problems.

Let me repeat, though:Especially the first link may be of interest to you. Also note that
people who find MinGW interesting often find Cygwin even more interesting..

rlc