Most popular GMP downloads

[Andreas Enge]

Hi Torbjörn,

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 03:39:18AM +0200, Torbjörn Granlund wrote:
> Surely, our newer releases with broader testing, faster code, richer set
> of functions, and broader systems support are much more popular than
> older releases?
> GMP 4.3.2 is the most popular release, followed by 5.1.1, 5.1.0, 5.1.3,
> 5.1.2, 5.0.2...

I think you have the answer here:

On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 03:12:24PM -0700, J. Anthony Sterrett, Jr. wrote:
> Oh, excellent! I was compiling the old version because I was attempting to
> compile GCC 4.9.0, and couldn't get it to find my current version of gmp
> (nor mpfr nor mpc). Therefore, I downloaded the version extant on gcc's
> website, just to make sure that everything would work.

This is also bugging me for mpc, people should not be prompted by gcc to down-
load older versions of our libraries.

When I look at the installation instructions
   http://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html ,
they state "GNU Multiple Precision Library (GMP) version 4.3.2 (or later)".
As they provide no link to the library, I do not see why people would then not
simply download the latest one available.

A problem could be the following ftp site:
   ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/infrastructure/
It distributes outdated libraries (which of course should not be visible
in your download statistics). 

When trying to configure gcc-4.9.0 without gmp etc. installed, the following
error message is printed:
configure: error: Building GCC requires GMP 4.2+, MPFR 2.4.0+ and MPC 0.8.0+.
Try the --with-gmp, --with-mpfr and/or --with-mpc options to specify
their locations.  Source code for these libraries can be found at
their respective hosting sites as well as at
ftp://gcc.gnu.org/pub/gcc/infrastructure/.  See also
http://gcc.gnu.org/install/prerequisites.html for additional info.  If
you obtained GMP, MPFR and/or MPC from a vendor distribution package,
make sure that you have installed both the libraries and the header
files.  They may be located in separate packages.

This might be a major culprit.

And of course there may be other places where outdated releases of our
software are advertised.

I will try to file a bug report with gcc, or at least bring the topic up
on the mailing list.

Andreas