On 8/21/2018 10:32 AM, Nick Bowler wrote: > Hi Sébastien, > > On 2018-08-21, Sébastien Hinderer <Sebastien.Hinderer@xxxxxxxx> wrote: >> What I do not understand, though, is why it is necessary to specify >> --build. I know the manual says that when one specifies --host then one >> has to specify --build, too, for historical reasons, but the manual also >> says that this will be fixed in the next version. Moreover, I did try to >> run configure with --host and no --build and that seemed to work, >> independently of whether it was a cross-compilation scenario or not. So >> I came to wonder how up-to-date the manual actually is. > > When you specify just --host (and not --build), configure autodetects > cross compiliation by attempting to run a compiled program. If the > program runs, configure assumes you are not cross compiling. If the > program does not run for any reason, configure assumes you are cross > compiling. > Yes, exactly. And MSVC isn't setup for autotools style cross compiling so you need to specify both to stop the auto-detection process. > The problem is this heuristic tends to be wrong as often as it is right, > so the recommendation now is to always specify --build and --host, which > disables this autodetection (configure enters cross compilation mode if > and only if the build and host triplets are different). > > The comment that "This will be fixed in the future" appears to have been > added in 2002. Clearly we've not made it to the future yet. :) Should it ever get here? Maybe the fix is to remove the comment. What we have has worked for many years with no one bugged about it enough to supply a patch to do otherwise. -- Earnie _______________________________________________ Autoconf mailing list Autoconf@xxxxxxx https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/autoconf
