Re: cross-compiling philosophy

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Larry Doolittle wrote:

> I know this subject keeps coming up.  I hope my
> suggestions are taken as constructive (presumably
> for post-2.58).
>
> I ran into one more package (GNU screen-3.9.15) where
> the authors used autoconf, and made no provision for
> cross-compiling.  In fact, they use many detailed
> run-time tests.  I was able to edit configure.in
> to add ACTION-IF-CROSS-COMPILING arguments (tuned to
> my special case) to their AC_TRY_RUN macros, and got
> myself on the air.  Not very satisfying.
>
> There is an implicit assumption in autoconf that
> people who cross-compile have no way to run the
> executables from within the configure script.  So,
> no provision is made for that possibility.

There are an infinite number of ways to run executables on a target.
How is configure to know how to run executables on a target? Your
example of a Unix-like system with NFS mounts to the build system is
the most trivial case.

One possiblity that comes to mind is to use DejaGNU as the framework
to execute the program on the target and require the user to write the
code to download the exectuable to the target and run it.  The user
would be responsible for writing the bit of Tcl code required to
interface to the target.

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