Cross-compilers.

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 20:53 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> Ralf Corsepius wrote:
> > On Tue, 2006-09-19 at 05:20 -0500, Rex Dieter wrote:
> 
> >> that's why --target was added in the first place (way back when).
> > ... broken packages ... confused maintainers ...
> > ancient/outdated/unmaintained packages ... many years ago, there once
> > was a bug in autoconf/automake which triggered this behavior.
> > This bug has been resolved many years ago.
> 
> Nice to hear.
> 
> So what do you suggest?  drop both --build/--target?

Dropping --target.

Dropping --target from %configure should be pretty safe, because only
very few packages really use it and even less really need it. It will
definitely break some (broken) packages, but the number being affected
should be very small and finite.

Dropping --build is one step more aggressive and therefore would require
some careful analysis of the consequences resulting from this:
* --build is used by most packages
* The pair "--build/--host" is used to trigger cross-compilation,
sometimes this is desired, sometimes not. Unfortunately autoconf's
behavior is non-trivial.
* Theoretically dropping --build should be safe, and implies to mplying
configure scripts to resort to an autodetected value), but this
definitely is one magnitude more dangerous than dropping --target.


Ralf