Alexandre Oliva <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On May 16, 2005, Russ Allbery <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> And package maintainers will never take cross-compilation seriously >> even if they really want to because they, for the most part, can't test >> it. > configure --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu \ > --host=i686-somethingelse-linux-gnu > should be enough to exercise most of the cross-compilation issues, if > you're using a sufficiently recent version of autoconf, but I believe > you already knew that. What, you mean my lovingly hacked upon Autoconf 2.13 doesn't work? But I can't possibly upgrade; I rewrote all of the option handling in a macro! Seriously, though, I think the above only tests things out to the degree that Autoconf would already be warning about no default specified for cross-compiling, yes? Wouldn't you have to at least cross-compile from a system with one endianness and int size to a system with a different endianness and int size and then try to run the resulting binaries to really see if the package would cross-compile? A scary number of packages, even ones that use Autoconf, bypass Autoconf completely when checking certain things or roll their own broken macros to do so. > The most serious problem regarding cross compilation is that it's > regarded as hard, so many people would rather not even bother to try to > figure it out. So it indeed becomes a hard problem, because then you > have to fix a lot of stuff in order to get it to work. It's not just that it's perceived as hard. It's that it's perceived as hard *and* obscure. Speaking as the maintainer of a package that I'm pretty sure could be cross-compiled with some work but that I'm also pretty sure likely wouldn't work just out of the box, I have never once gotten a single bug report, request, or report of anyone cross-compiling INN. Given that, it's hard to care except in some abstract cleanliness sense (and I already got rid of all of the Autoconf warnings as best as I could figure out, in the abstract caring department). -- Russ Allbery ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
