Canadian cross / caddr_t / mingw problem

["Steve Ellcey " <sellcey at mips dot com>]

I have run into a canadian cross build problem that seems to have existed
for some time involving the caddr_t type and the mingw compilers.  For
example, here is an email from 2011:

https://sourceware.org/ml/crossgcc/2011-03/msg00161.html

There are several comments about how to work around this problem but
I haven't found any actual proposed fix for it.  Addtionally, I notice
that this problematic test for caddr_t is using an old to-be-obsoleted
form of the AC_TYPE_CHECK macro and we should probably change that.
There is also an obsolete AC_TYPE_CHECK use for ssize_t in the same gcc
configure.ac file and in the libjava configure.ac.

Before I dig into this too far I thought I would ask if anyone already
has a fix (not a workaround, a fix) for this problem.

If you are not familiar with the issue, it looks like when building
a normal cross compiler on linux AC_TYPE_CHECK(caddr_t, char *) finds
the caddr_t type and all is fine.  When building a canadian cross on
linux using the mingw compilers then the check for caddr_t fails
and auto-host.h winds up with "#define caddr_t char *" in it and that
causes a build failure later on.

Steve Ellcey
sellcey@mips.com