RFC: Support both Cross and Native compiler from configure

[Joel Sherrill]

On Sun, Jun 23, 2019, 8:32 AM Tamar Christina <Tamar.Christina@arm.com>
wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> For AArch64 we'd like to move the generation of some of our generated
> files from being a part of maintainer mode to just being an artefact of the
> normal build.
>
> The reason we'd like to do this is two folds:
> 1) maintainer mode requires a specific version of autotools etc, which is
> different than what other projects require (obviously) and so you have to
> juggle with PATH to get it to work.
> 2) It muddles reviews with these generates files and makes commits bigger
> too.
> 3) people often forget to run them, resulting in half working code.
>
> But in order for us to do so we of course require to be able to detect
> both the native compiler and If cross compiler, the cross compiler, as the
> tool needs to run as part of the compilation process.
>
> In short my question is, would there be any objections to do this?
> Configure will then check for both.
>

What does this generation process require? Will it add new requirements for
the host environment? I'm particularly concerned about cross builds but
requiring more host tools should always be evaluated.

Thanks.

--joel



> Cheers,
> Tamar
>