From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Alexander Neundorf Subject: Re: cross-compiling alternatives (was Re: [PATCH 0/1] Embedded Maintainer(s)...) Date: Fri, 13 Jun 2008 11:32:55 +0200 Message-ID: <200806131132.55543.neundorf@eit.uni-kl.de> References: <1209577322.25560.402.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <200806131106.18487.neundorf@eit.uni-kl.de> <1213348320.26255.231.camel@pmac.infradead.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1213348320.26255.231.camel@pmac.infradead.org> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-embedded-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org On Friday 13 June 2008 11:12:00 you wrote: > On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 11:06 +0200, Alexander Neundorf wrote: > > > Why on earth does someone need this explicitly during the build? > > > If you have portable software, all of that should be hidden in the code > > > and use "sizeof(int)". > > > > From the "developer of a buildsystem" POV: there will be users who will > > need it. > > I think that epitomises what's wrong with autoconf. Sometimes, the best Actually I think autoconf itself is not that bad. What is bad is "autotools", i.e. that you get a combination of several tools which have to work together, all huge shell scripts, all using different syntax, etc. > thing to do is tell your users that they _don't_ need whatever it is > they're asking you for. We agree that if possible, tests which run something should be avoided. But seriously, sometimes this is really very hard. I don't dare to say impossible, but I'm tempted. E.g. in python there are tests which call functions and check their result to see if we are currently on a platform where that function is broken (I think there was such a test for poll() and some other functions). Alex