Hi, here's the scenario:
freshly built latest (native) gcc from a stable release tarball (4.5.1 for the sake of completeness, but that shouldn't really matter) with the full suggested 3-stage bootstrap sequence.
Also installed it as the host compiler and configured the system configured to use its runtime libraries.
Now, say I see a couple of patches/fixes for next gcc release that I know I can safely apply to the source tree I used to build mine, and I don't want to wait for next official release, what's the best approach?
1) clean everything, apply patches, reconfigure and 3-stage bootstrap rebuild? (that is, forget about everything and spend another 2 hours hoping everything's fine)
2) apply patches, 3-stage bootstrap rebuild WITHOUT cleaning/configuring?
3) Apply patches, non-bootstrapped build? (That is, rebuild it using itself as it is after the initial build, because I know that the applied patches are irrelevant to build gcc itself)?
More generally, I'm trying to figure out what's the best practice in case you want to follow some of gcc improvements happening on the source code after an initial build, without too much overhead while doing so...
Thanks, Andrea.