Re: (top level patch) Autoconfiscate. (Woo!)

[Nathanael Nerode <neroden@twcny.rr.com>]

>> Canadian cross (host=i386-cygwin, target=powerpc-eabisim) produced a 
>> Makefile with no significant differences.  There was a set of 
>> spurious differences:  I didn't have all the "i386-cygwin-foo" and 
>> "powerpc-eabi-foo" tools in place.
>> Autoconf actually checks to see if they're present, and if they're 
>> not, defaults to the unprefixed 'foo' tools.
>
>This is a mistake.  You could end up thinking you built tools for one
>platform but that will actually work on your native platform.  Please
>arrange for host and target tools not to be too smart in this regard,
>and actually not go for unprefixed unless we know we don't really need
>a cross.
Will start working on this.  There are a couple of ways to do it, but 
the easiest is to switch over to the STRICT versions included in 
acx.m4.  Heh....  I'll probably have that patch submitted by 
tomorrow; it's simple enough.

>> +# _NCN_TOOL_PREFIXES:  Some stuff that oughtta be done in 
>AC_CANONICAL_SYSTEM 
>
>Would you mind renaming the _NCN macros to say _TOPLEV or so?  Nothing
>personal, it's just...  Well...  You understand, don't you? :-)

Heh.  Well, there were CYG_ macros, and DJ_ macros, and...

Anyway, once I get them in their 'happiest form', I'm going to submit 
them to the autoconf maintainers to become AC_* (and I expect to get 
them in, since they're pretty simple).  So, that will take care of that 
in the long run.

>> +# clear some things potentially inherited from environment.
>> +
>> +enable_threads=no
>> +enable_shared=no
>> +enable_libstdcxx_v3=yes
>
>I'm not sure this is actually necessary.  Traditionally, configure
>scripts have taken --with/--enable arguments from the environment too,
>even if it's just because such variables are not cleaned up.  I don't
>really see a reason to override this behavior.

OK, will strip.  I have to make sure the defaults are correct anyway,
so this will probably come as part of a larger patch to handle 
enable_ and with_ stuff in a more autoconfy manner.

>> +        PATH=$PATH:${PWD=`${PWDCMD-pwd}`} ; export PATH
>
>Huh?  Any idea why we need this?  (I realize it's inherited from the
>old configure, but it would be nice if we could get rid of this at
>some point.  It is *so* wrong!)

I have absolutely no idea why we need this; I don't think we run any
programs in the toplevel working directory.  I'll submit a patch to
delete that.

--Nathanael