I understand that egcs produced better code than gcc for x86 at one time, but this was never true for all architectures (example: gcc and egcs for ARM were always identical). Since egcs has been merged back into gcc, more and more of these special cased spec files are gonna be causing headaches in the future as well. The "CC=egcs" force is done a patch (uggh). A possibly better approach would be to do the following in the spec file: if [ -e `type -p egcs` ] ; then \ make CC=egcs ; \ else \ make ; \ fi
Thanks for the tip. We'll keep an eye out for this in the next release.