[Zlib-devel] rethinking uname and toolchain detection

[Enrico Weigelt]

Hi folks,


the current uname-based compiler/target detection is a bit broken
(or at least incomplete): looking at uname tells about the current
machine, not the target one. in a crosscompiling situation (crossing
between OS'es), it has great chance of failing. Requireing the user
to pass the target's uname is quite suboptimal: he has to know about
that (not even documented in --help output) on the one hand, and on
the other hand he needs an target- AND package-specific adaption
in his buildsystem.

If ./configure would find it out automatically, this would be
_MUCH_ better, IMHO.

I'd start with an separate toolchain and target detection script
(so it can be easily shared w/ other projects, maybe someday even
as an own independent project) which prints out the information in 
an trivially-parsable way (eg. simple text based attribute-value-list) 
and is called by the ./configure script. Maybe a conceptional superset 
of gcc's "-dumpmachine" flag.

What do you think about this ?

Anyone here who could help porting that script to non-GNU platforms ?


cu
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 Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/

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