Re: GCC 4.1: Buildable on GHz machines only?

[Russ Allbery <rra at stanford dot edu>]

Alexandre Oliva <aoliva@redhat.com> writes:
> On May 16, 2005, Russ Allbery <rra@stanford.edu> wrote:

>> And package maintainers will never take cross-compilation seriously
>> even if they really want to because they, for the most part, can't test
>> it.

> configure --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu \
> --host=i686-somethingelse-linux-gnu 

> should be enough to exercise most of the cross-compilation issues, if
> you're using a sufficiently recent version of autoconf, but I believe
> you already knew that.

What, you mean my lovingly hacked upon Autoconf 2.13 doesn't work?  But I
can't possibly upgrade; I rewrote all of the option handling in a macro!

Seriously, though, I think the above only tests things out to the degree
that Autoconf would already be warning about no default specified for
cross-compiling, yes?  Wouldn't you have to at least cross-compile from a
system with one endianness and int size to a system with a different
endianness and int size and then try to run the resulting binaries to
really see if the package would cross-compile?

A scary number of packages, even ones that use Autoconf, bypass Autoconf
completely when checking certain things or roll their own broken macros to
do so.

> The most serious problem regarding cross compilation is that it's
> regarded as hard, so many people would rather not even bother to try to
> figure it out.  So it indeed becomes a hard problem, because then you
> have to fix a lot of stuff in order to get it to work.

It's not just that it's perceived as hard.  It's that it's perceived as
hard *and* obscure.  Speaking as the maintainer of a package that I'm
pretty sure could be cross-compiled with some work but that I'm also
pretty sure likely wouldn't work just out of the box, I have never once
gotten a single bug report, request, or report of anyone cross-compiling
INN.  Given that, it's hard to care except in some abstract cleanliness
sense (and I already got rid of all of the Autoconf warnings as best as I
could figure out, in the abstract caring department).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>