While building GCC, we also build some other compilers besides the C compiler that we have found are necessary for some high-level software. Currently GCC also builds a C++, Fortran, Objective-C and Objective-C++.

So when Maneage doesn't build GCC itself and relies on the host's compiler, if these compilers don't exist the configuration will fail in the middle and can be very annoying (as reported in bug #58917).

But the manual solution there is really not scalable and can itself cause bugs and annoying situations (for example if a project author forgets to set 'need_gfortran'!).

So we should define a way to use the software building Makefiles to see if special compilers are necessary. This is what occurs to me right now:

For those packages that need non C/C++ compilers, we can add a special prerequisite for that compiler that is also defined during the building of GCC. In this way, with a '--dry-run' run of the 'high-level.mk', we should be able to see if certain compilers are necessary.