Date: Fri, 28 Apr 2000 12:12:31 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Peter Eisentraut <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
1) build != host -- That won't work because firstly config.sub isn't quite
that smart to guarantee lexical equalness in all cases, the problem often
being the vendor part being kinda random. Secondly it will unnecessarily
restrict such cases as an i486 -> i586 build (or equivalent for sparc,
alpha, etc.)
This works because build != host only arises when the user does
something odd. If you are building with a cross-compiler, you should
use --host. If you are not building with a cross-compiler, you should
not use --host.
What actual case are you concerned about?
2) Test program fails to run. That will not always catch things such as a
FreeBSD -> Linux build. But running a test program might fail because the
run-time environment isn't set up right, for example problems with the
dynamic linker. Or consider building in /tmp which might be mounted
noexec. What you really need to test is if the program would run at the
installation destination, but you can't really do that.
Running a test program is a fallback for configure scripts which do
not use AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM, and packages which do not distribute
config.guess and config.sub. It's true that it does not always work.
But we can certainly check for the case of being unable to build
executables, combined with the absence of a --host option, and
complain that the compiler doesn't work.
Ian
