Re: cross-compiling philosophy

[Paul Eggert]

Larry Doolittle <address@hidden> writes:

> Comments?  If I developed, tested, and submitted a patch,
> would anybody look at it?

Yay!  I would!  (But it'd be after 2.58 of course.)

Here are some more detailed thoughts:

> 1. Add a new flag, like "CROSS_RUN_SCRIPT", that
>    defines how to run programs on the host.

Should the maintainer be required to define the cross-run script?
I'd think that often this would be up to the installer.  So, shouldn't
"configure" have an option to specify the cross-run script?  E.g.,
"configure --cross-run=/my/platform/target/run-on-target".

> 2. Add new macro AC_TRY_COMMAND_HOST, that uses
>    CROSS_RUN_SCRIPT if cross-compiling, otherwise
>    falls back to AC_TRY_COMMAND.

Shouldn't AC_TRY_COMMAND do this?  I'd think it'd be the normal case.

That is, I would expect AC_TRY_COMMAND to be equivalent to
AC_TRY_COMMAND_HOST.  We will need a new macro AC_TRY_COMMAND_BUILD
that runs on the build system (useful for deducing things about which
compiler we're using, say) but normally people are interested in
trying to run the package, not to run tools used to build the package.