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Re: Updating top-level autoconf to 2.59
John Cowan wrote:
Michael Eager scripsit:
I would much prefer explicitly specifying that the build is cross or
native. I want to specify --cross or --native (or the equivalent).
I'd be happy to discard backward compatibility.
The trouble is that you can't be sure that there aren't really
three different machine architectures -- you might be building a compiler
on a Linux box to run on a Solaris system to generate code for an ARM,
for example. Is building a compiler on a Linux box to run on Solaris
to generate code for the same Linux box a cross-compiler or not?
How about building a compiler on Solaris to run on Linux for Linux?
And so on.
I know the machines which I am building on and the target I am
building for. No guessing. No ambiguity. I know that Solaris
is not Linux. I can ALWAYS be sure that I am building on three
different architectures when I explicitly specify host, build,
and target.
I don't need autoconf to attempt to guess what I mean with I say
--build=i686-linux-gnu, --target=i686-solaris, --cross.
But I agree that it shouldn't matter whether a build, host, or target
switch is specified or defaulted; what should matter is the equality
or inequality of the value of those switches.
What others have said is that at times what appears to be a native
build, since the switch values are the same, is actually a a cross-compile.
I think that you miss the point. It's the guessing that is
problematic.
--
Michael Eager eager@eagercon.com
1960 Park Blvd., Palo Alto, CA 94306 650-325-8077