Re: AC_CHECK_FILE and cross-compilation

[Alexandre Oliva]

On Oct  4, 2000, Akim Demaille <address@hidden> wrote:

> I'm not in favor of removing this ``limitation'' because this macro
> addresses well its point.  If you want to check for the presence of a
> DTD etc., then sorry, but it seems to me that it's a runtime issue.

The good thing about AC_CHECK_FILE is that, when doing a cross build,
it will tell the user building the program that he's got to figure out
by himself whether a certain file will be available on the host system
and tell `configure' so.  When not cross building, `test -f' can ease
the users' life.  When testing for properties of the build system, one
shouldn't use this macro.  This should be better documented.  But I
don't think we should have a macro to test for files in the build
platform, since that might lead people to just use it instead of
AC_CHECK_FILE to get rid of the warning, without understanding the
real consequences of doing it.

-- 
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