Re: FYI: Adjust circular dependencies

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Oct 12, 2000, Akim Demaille <address@hidden> wrote:

> | +2000-10-12  Morten Eriksen <address@hidden>
> | +
> | +   * acspecific.m4 (_AC_EXEEXT): Change of strategy for the macro, we
> | +   now search for a valid executable suffix. The old code had
> | +   circular dependencies which basically made it fubar.

> Perfect with me.  Waiting for a second approval.

I'm a little bit worried about dropping the explicit tests for
DOS-based platforms.  I recall some problems last time someone
attempted to do it.

In fact, the whole notion of EXEEXT and OBJEXT is odd when you take
cross-compilation into account.  Is the executable extension detected
by these macros a property of the build, host or target environment?
Well, we can disregard target since autoconf isn't concerned with
that, so we're left with build and host.  Sure enough, the extension
needed for executables is a property of the host, but it would seem to
me that relying on `test's aliasing of foo and foo.exe is actually
detecting a property of the build machine.

Matters get even worse when you take into account GNU tool-chains will
generate *.exe files when either host or target are DOS-based.  That's
kind of forced because of the lack of distinction between the
executable extension for host and for build: build program names end
up being appended `.exe' extensions just because the host platform
needs .exe, and things just get worse from then on.

This is a horrible can of worms.  I'd rather not have this change in
without complete tool-chain builds of Cygwin native, GNU/Linux native,
GNU/Linux-x-Cygwin and some canadian cross with Cygwin in the middle.

-- 
Alexandre Oliva   Enjoy Guarana', see http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/
Red Hat GCC Developer                  address@hidden, redhat.com}
CS PhD student at IC-Unicamp        address@hidden, gnu.org}
Free Software Evangelist    *Please* write to mailing lists, not to me