Re: ghc 6.0.1 and Mac OS X 10.2.6 build

Alastair Reid wrote:
> > Tests needing a *target* machine are bad when it comes to
> > cross-compilation, so we should try to avoid this for GHC. OK, GHC is not
> > really capable of cross-compilation yet, but we shouldn't make things
> > worse. 
>
>
> This is a topic I haven't thought about much.  What is the recommended way of 
> dealing with it?
>
> Do we cut the autoconf scripts in two and run one half on the source machine 
> and one on the target machine?
>
> Do we replace all those autoconf tests (ugly but accurate) with platform-based 
> tests (simpler but brittle)? [...]

I just had a look at GCC 3.3.1's sources and the way this is handled is 
effectively
based on the name of the target platform (which gets magically mapped to some
header in gcc/config). I don't think that this brittle because things like this
are hardwired into the platform ABI forever, otherwise one would lose binary
compatibility. Furthermore, there seem to be some reasonable defaults for 
unknown
or partly known target platforms (e.g. "no underscores for ELF"). Apart from 
that,
I can't see any other solution for this problem. Doing a runtime test on the
build/host platform for a feature of the target platform is simply wrong...

Cheers,
   S.