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Hello,

On Jan 8, 2007, at 14:06, Blair Sadewitz wrote:

> No, we cannot simply use autoconf this way.  The big win one gets with
> all the effort to use the reachover framework is elegant
> cross-building.
> The GNU autotools, in virtue of their design, implicitly assume that
> the host and target are the same.  Despite the fact that you can tell
> it "use my cross-tools", it will do as all too many politicians do and
> act as if it is doing what you want but cannot.  How can the
> autotools--which _execute_ small test programs to make critical
> decisions--produce useful binaries for the target platform by running
> tests on the build host?  It simply cannot.

My two cents:
we already have a few autoconfy packages in the base system, think gcc, 
binutils etc. - they're built by reachover without attempting to muck 
with autoconf.
So, my naive naive suggestion would be to figure out what files need 
special handling, as in extra flags ( they'll likely need special 
handling on all NetBSD ports ) and which are really port-dependent ( 
stuff like ppc_video.c, arm_video.c etc. in 
Xserver/hw/xfree86/os-support/ ) - I think the vast majority of all the 
tests and decisions made by autoconf would be unnecessary on NetBSD 
anyway since the outcome would be the same on all ports. Alpha and 
sparc64 might need a little special handling but even those don't need 
autoconf's help to determine the size of a long.
The same about dependencies - no need to check for them, they're either 
there or the build process is broken and then it's ok to just complain 
and exit.

have fun
Michael
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