Re: cross-compilation tool detection

[Steffen Dettmer]

On Fri, Oct 16, 2009, Rainer Weikusat <address@hidden> wrote:
> > If you regenerate your configure file with a newer autoconf,
> > that particular message has been reworded to not sound so
> > scary or severe; we have conceded that some people insist on
> > running with non-triplet-prefixed cross-tools,
>
> Calling a program arm-unknown-linux-gcc isn't particularly
> useful. Especially if there are two arm-unknown-linux-gcc's
> which are quite different, each of them needed for a particular
> cross-compilation environment on the same machine.

why not having arm-platform1-linux-gcc and arm-platform2-linux-gcc?
(maybe because evaluating vendor field is ugly/bad?).

What IMHO is even less useful is when autoconf may fall back from
arm-platform2-linux-gcc -E to /lib/cpp or alike.

> And there is another issue, although not a technical one: Computers
> are good at remembering and dealing with 'details' without the need to
> use mnemonic tricks necessary for human minds to do their own
> 'systematization'. So why encode these technical details in the names
> of programs in such a way, as opposed to (referring to the environment
> mentioned above) assigning names which mean something to a user, eg
> based on the project the compiler is intended to be used for? Imagine
> (as isn't quite unlikely) all such projects involve Linux, why
> have it in each and every name?
>
> Just because some people compile code for other operating
> systems?

Yes, because it uses linux startup code. Actually I think "linux"
might not be perfectly suited, because linux with glibc (and its
startup code) may be very different to maybe a linux with another
libc or even without ELF support or so. But I don't know why a
triplet "prefix" is used instead of some arbitrary-name prefix
(like Julias_linux_glibc2-cc or so).

oki,

Steffen