Cross-compilation (was: Thank you for not using autoconf)

[Rob Landley]

On 06/11/2013 02:48:09 PM, Sam Liddicott wrote:
> > If all else fails, there's qemu. I'm happy to fix actual bugs, but
> special cases where your build environment is not standards compliant  
> are
> not bugs in _my_ code.
> >
> > Rob
> 
> Some people though are not merely writing code to scratch their own  
> itch
> but want it to have a wide distribution and are pleased to spend  
> effort to
> that end.

Wide distribution. Uh-huh.

We're coming up on a billion android devices, and have already dropped  
below 100k Solaris sites. Losing 1% of the Android market to gain _all_  
of the Solaris market would be a very large net loss of "wide  
distribution".

Autoconf was designed for the world before the microcomputer, when the  
most common machine in the world (PDP-8 before the Apple II took over  
in 1977) sold a grand total of 50k machines in its production lifetime  
(see http://homepage.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/faqs/#PDP), and reading  
"soul of a new machine" or "a few good men from univac" was keeping up  
with industry developments rather than retrocomputing.

The world honestly isn't like that anymore. EMX ported a Posix  
development environment to OS/2 20 years ago  
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EMX_(programming_environment) ).

If your development environment is broken: fix it.

Rob