Re: BUILD_CC (aka HOST_CC) redux

[Ralf Corsepius]

On Mon, 2003-09-29 at 22:45, Dan Kegel wrote:
> In cross-compiling the latest nmap, which uses a recent autoconf,
> I noticed that it uses CC both for target stuff and for build-time-only
> stuff.  Looking around via google, I was surprised to see that autoconf
> doesn't seem to have a standard macro to set BUILD_CC!
> 
> A proposal was posted four years ago
> ( see http://sources.redhat.com/ml/autoconf/1999-07/msg00089.html )
> but doesn't seem to have been popular.
> 
> glibc uses the very simple
> 
> if test $host != $build; then
>    AC_CHECK_PROGS(BUILD_CC, gcc cc)
> fi
> 
> which is pretty good (it's as good as the assumption that
> you can tell you're cross-compiling by comparing build and host;
> I've run into situations where that's false, but that assumption
> is made in a lot of places, so I just grin and mangle my host
> identifier to make it true).
> 
> Octave also grabs BUILD_CFLAGS at the same time, which is
> a pretty good idea, and it doesn't suffer from the above assumption:
> http://www.mit.edu/afs/sipb/project/octave/src/octave-2.1.44/configure.in
> 
> So what's the preferred solution?
IMO, BUILD|HOST_CC etc. are hacks to "tunnel" a subset of build-system
settings into package configurations. 

They are only applicable to very simple configuration cases/packages,
which do not need to apply both build-system and host-system autoconf
checks.

Ralf