I think I may just be burnt-out after working with all of those
packages in modular Xorg too often. ;)
I have a new respect for qsubst.

At any rate, evidently I misunderstood the post I was responding to,
and so most of what I wrote can be construed as making too strong a
case.

What Christos suggests is what I was planning on trying.  The only
problem I see--and again, I could be seeing ghosts here--is that in
modular Xorg, they don't use autoconf to simply produce things like
config.h. If that were the case, I wouldn't worry much.
Unfortunately, their methodology is more complex than that.

For instance, they sprinkle hard-coded defines into Makefile.am files
which, IIRC, configure sometimes does and sometimes does not have
provenance over. Do a

find . \( -name "Makefile.*" -name "configure.ac" -name "*.h" \) -exec
grep -H _BSD_SOURCE {} +

in the Xorg tree and you'll see what I'm talking about.  They used to
even define that in their [installed] headers, IIRC, which caused
serious problems when building certain applications.  I changed every
occurance of that to _NETBSD_SOURCE in my tree.  This shouldn't cause
a problem because things like _POSIX_SOURCE override it when
necessary, right?

Moreover, unlike XFree86, there are many dependencies involving
important headers which all must be installed prior to building any
module which requires them.  Thus, if we were to simply use autoconf,
we'd need a shadow root, right?

Of course, as I said in the beginning, maybe I'm overly complicating
things simply because I've been spending too much time with modular
Xorg. :)

What you noted, Michael, I do agree with, though.
I believe the most severe problem involving cross-compiling is DRI in
video drivers, which we [unfortunately] do not have to worry about,
yet.
Given the percentage of our supported platforms  which will ever
likely have DRI, though, we could either have the users build the
drivers themselves
or distribute them in binary form built somewhere else other than the
autobuild cluster.

Now I'm going to go look at the automounter's autoconf setup and our
wrapper makefiles in src/gnu.  If I could just get Mesa working I
could  then completely move on to learning about this stuff.

Thanks for all of your input, I appreciate it.

--Blair



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