Re: automake 1.4g: About `make install-strip'

[Alexandre Oliva]

On May 28, 2001, "Maciej W. Rozycki" <address@hidden> wrote:

>  I was thinking of a configure-time check if `install -s' works.

I'm not sure I'd trust such a check.  I'm pretty sure it might be
possible to construct situations in strip would succeed in stripping a
certain simple program for a different architecture, but would fail in
case of more complex programs, for example, containing other sections.

> For example I have $tooldir/bin first in the PATH environment
> variable when doing cross-builds, so `install -s' succeeds for me.

cross tools are generally named <target>-<progname>.  If install looks
for `strip', it will find the wrong one.

> another possibility is to extend install so it can be instructed to
> use a specific program to strip.  The install program is a part of
> fileutils -- there should be no technical problem with making any
> changes.

Except that it wouldn't fix the immense installed user base of GNU
install, plus all other install programs, so we can't depend on this
working anyway.  Of course, we can test for this feature before
committing to it.  But I don't like adding configure-time tests that
few people would use (I generally prefer to defer to `missing'), and
then, we'd be running a shell-script anyway, and we wouldn't be able
to cache results, unless we came up with some way for missing to cache
results of tests.

-- 
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