[Zlib-devel] zlib 1.2.4.3 for your perusal

[Volker Grabsch]

Alon Bar-Lev <alon.barlev at gmail.com> schrieb:
> On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 4:33 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt at metux.de> wrote:
> > forget about that whole $CHOST / $CROSS_PREFIX crap, it only
> > makes things overcomplicated and *breaks* many build environments.

How can a completely optional feature break anything?
... in a build environment as simple as that of zlib?

The $CROSS_PREFIX's only task is to initialize $CC, $LD, $AR, etc.
How complicated can that be, and what kind of builds does this
break? Any system on which $CROSS_PREFIX causes wrong initializations
can set the $CC, etc. by hand.

> > Just make sure the user can pass the complete pathnames of the
> > toolchain commands (as eg. my patch added for nm). That's probably
> > the most generic way (*1).
>
> No it isn't.
> As there are some calls to "uname" and such which should be bypassed
> in case of cross compile.

I fully agree. In mingw-cross-env, my experience is that most
packages conflate the build with the host environment, mostly
visible by _running_ test scripts (instead of just building them)
and by calling tools like "uname" to get host environment information.

Zlib is a very simple package in this regard. The ./configure script
just needs to check whether some test programs compile or not, i.e.
no need to actually run them. Also, there are no code generators or
any necessary calls to tools like "uname".

If so many other packages get cross-compiling right, it should also
be possible for zlib to get this right.


Greets,

    Volker

-- 
Volker Grabsch
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