Re: Checking for SSE/MMX support

[Martijn van Buul <martijnb%atlas.ipv6.stack.nl@localhost>]

It occurred to me that joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost wrote in 
gmane.os.netbsd.devel.pkgsrc.wip.general:
> On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 06:51:07PM +0000, Martijn van Buul wrote:
>> Unfortunately, because of
>> autoconf (Which makes the same assumption about "host == target", and 
>> compiles
>> small testprograms to be executed on the build host.
>
> This is incorrect blaming. Most tests delivered with autoconf itself are
> perfectly crosscompiling safe.

While this is true for the autoconf-supplied tests, I've seen too many
roll-your-own tests to make the point moot. The silliest one being a program
that made assorted assumptions (Includuding *redefining* CFLAGS, LDFLAGS
and PREFIX) based on `uname`. Other than that, I've seen programs do strange
tests to see if $(random_functioncall) is "broken", to see whether the word
alignment is big- or little-endian, test programs being executed in order
to figure out the value of a certain #define, etc. 

While it maybe unfair to blame autoconf for all of this, autoconf *certainly*
doesn't make it any difficult to write these kind of tests (In contrary, doing
it properly is often harder), so I still maintain that my original statement
is true:

Autoconf is a wolf in sheep clothes, as the Dutch saying goes.

If a package has 999 tests which *might* be cross-buildable, even a single
one that *isn't* destroys the whole pupose. Not too long ago, someone 
(Krister?) tried to tackle this problem for some slower platforms. It turned
out that the most effective way was "Linux emulation on steroids": Have the
kernel include a fully-fledged target emulation with some shortcuts, so
autoconf would still "work". The other option was to fix all the 5000+ 
configure scripts hiding in pkgsrc. Over and over again.




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