Re: Guile FTBFS on hppa - problem in detecting stack direction?

[Bernhard R. Link]

* Carlos O'Donell <address@hidden> [080807 03:41]:
> On Wed, Aug 6, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Neil Jerram <address@hidden> wrote:
> > I've appended the relevant bit of configure.in below.  Can anyone help
> > with why this might not be working on hppa?
> 
> Please don't try to detect stack growth direction. It's part of the
> ABI. Select it based on the canonical target triplet.

Just because something is part of some ABI is no reason to not try to
autodetect it. It's an elementary philisophical idea behind autoconf
(and one of its biggest advantages in my POV) that you do not check for
the system but for its features[1].
This allows it to support most new platforms for most programs out of
the box (and not fail if anything changes anywhere).

There are some reasons to sometimes depart from that rule, when things
are too hard to check or too subtle to break. But just that this
information can be deduced from some triplet in alone is no reason at
all.

Hochachtungsvoll,
        Bernhard R. Link

[1] Most autoconf/automake generated build systems (that do not use
libtool) can even work without any config.guess and config.sub scripts,
so just be run on any architecture not even created when the source was
created.