Lionel Debroux (./7) :
Sure, stopping the build process at the first error (to prevent incomplete builds going unnoticed from the user, in the middle of the pile of terminal output created by the build process, and creating trouble later) is completely useless for the user.So is automatic handling (application, protection against reapplication) of the TIGCC patch to GCC and binutils.

All this is irrelevant once you have the stuff built, which just takes reading and following the instructions. And besides, end users should be using binary packages anyway (and blame Romain for discontinuing his debs, there were already no TIGCC packages in his repo when I finally removed it for being unmaintained when he left; the full story: 1. those packages had been broken for months and he didn't care to fix them despite multiple nags from me, who received complaints from Debian users about this, 2. he blamed the fact that my build system is not autotools for all the problems and 3. he refused to accept that TIGCC is not a Debian-native package and that he needs to do the packaging separately from the upstream source code, so he just removed the packages :-/).

And so is the support for creating a SFX archive ready for use on the same OS flavour.

SFX archives are a very poor substitute for proper packages. In fact, I even plan to discontinue my binary tarballs as of the next release. They tend to be very distro-specific anyway, at least for the first 6 months or so after a release, as no other distro ships an as new glibc as Fedora. (The glibc release schedule is explicitly synchronized to Fedora's, given that the glibc maintainer works for Red Hat.) And Fedora users are better off using the RPMs.

Such a broad generalization would mean that in your opinion, easing the process of making a release (by adding cross-compilation support) is unneeded or useless ?

Yes. Your changes don't actually make it easier for me to do a release. They don't solve the actual problems I have, like having to get the Delphi parts built somehow. In fact, even you have to boot into that inferior OS to build those parts, they cannot be cross-built. Other reasons I didn't do a Beta 9 release include unsolved release blockers, which aren't solved in your tree either, such as issues with the __attribute__((may_alias)) usage in ld-tigcc with current GCC, and the mere fact that there are no fixes which are important enough to rush out a release. The "problems" you're solving haven't been an obstacle for me to make a release at all.