Failure to build libjava on 512MB machine

Wed Jan 31 11:43:00 GMT 2007

May I respectfully point out that the gcc make process already has 
hard-coded hackery to work around the limitations of certain machines, 
oses, non-GNU makes, linkers, and assembers, etc? (The thing that comes 
to mind is the 42 item limit for make rules on AIX: see 
libstdc++-v3/include/Makefile.am. There are no doubt many others.)
Adding hacks to the java Makefiles to make parse.o compilable across a 
large variety of machines/os's seems necessary and essential. If not, 
the java build and testing base will only go down over time. This seems 
the opposite of what you want, especially after the big merge to ecj 
that was just finished.
Either this part of libjava can be made optional, or the rule for this 
object file can be made more complex, or the file can be compiled 
without optimizations, whatever. There seem to be a variety of 
approaches that would work.
I can understand the interest in wanting to delve deeper into the actual 
causes of the memory explosion with compiling java/html/parse.o, and the 
reluctance to add build hacks, but I am somewhat concerned with the 
response of the java maintainers (and others) that it's OK to require 
 >512MB to bootstrap gcc with java, or that make times "WORKSFORME."
best,
benjamin