Re: cross-compiling philosophy

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Sun, 2 Nov 2003, Larry Doolittle wrote:
> >
> > I think in this case your razor is too sharp. The failure to download
> > an image to the target should not be considered to be a feature-test
> > failure.  Seperating the functions keeps them simple and ensures that
> > any reported errors can easily be handled.
>
> Your error-handling argument is convincing.  I can imagine
> where the test program accidentally grows in size (perhaps someone
> changed compiler versions) and the binary becomes too big to
> fit in the target memory.  This error needs consequences
> different from the error flags set up by the writer of the
> AC_RUN_IFELSE test.  Can you convince me the process needs
> to be divided into more than two pieces (download + run)?

Certainly it is a necessity to support cleaning up after the test.
It is normal for configure to remove test executables.  That is at
least a third required step.

> If someone turns off the target or breaks the network connection
> at just the wrong time, I personally think it's acceptable
> to have autoconf stall.  We get into atomicity of network
> operation trouble pretty fast, and that's not something
> that autoconf can hope to solve.  We kind of have to assume
> that the environment in which autoconf runs is stable and not
> half-crashed, hmm?

Whenever more than one computer is involved, it is quite
possible/likely that the environment will be half-crashed.  If the
environment is half-crashed, configure should notice it and exit
rather than producing bad test results.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
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http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen