Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] Specifying --build (was: make curl fails)

[Tony Theodore]

On 28 November 2011 21:45, Volker Grabsch <address@hidden> wrote:
> Tony Theodore schrieb:
>> My original thought for this was to remove the src/*config-update
>> patches and copy these config.* files over instead. Patches have one
>> main advantage over this - we'll know when the files are updated by
>> upstream and can remove them easily.
>>
>> We can test for newer files:
>>     # Update config.* files for newer OSes
>>     [ '$(PREFIX)/bin/config.guess' -nt '$(1)/config.guess' ] && \
>>     cp '$(PREFIX)/bin/config.guess' '$(1)' && \
>>     cp '$(PREFIX)/bin/config.sub'   '$(1)'
>>
>> however that will depend on release timing for binutils.
>>
>> So what do you think, is it better to remove these 15 patches and have
>> a few extra lines, or leave it as-is and not install config.sub?
>
> I think we shouldn't do either. What's wrong with simply adding
>
>    --build="`config.guess`"
>
> and be done with it?

The problem with using --build is that it still calls the outdated
config.sub to validate the value, and will fail. We can get around
this using;

    ac_cv_build='$(shell config.sub `config.guess`)'

> The only downside is that we won't know when this can be removed,
> which is a bad thing in general, but in this particular case I
> don't think this is bad at all. Even if a package upgrades its
> config.guess, that project has shown that they don't upgrade
> their Autotools stuff often. So it is very likely that config.guess
> will become outdated again, causing yet some other trouble in
> the future.
>
> To make the point clear, I'd be even perfectly okay if we add
> the "--build" option consistently to all packages which use
> Autoconf, as a matter of "good style" to avoid future trouble.

We could go a step further and use a site config file [1] for this.
I'll see if it works and report back.

Cheers,

Tony

[1] http://www.gnu.org/s/hello/manual/autoconf/Site-Defaults.html