Re: [Exim-dev] Bits and pieces

David Woodhouse wrote:

> Your experience differs from mine. As an end-user who spends a lot of
> time cross-compiling for different systems, I've lost track of the
> number of hours I've spent tracking auto* idiocy when a well-written
> makefile would have worked far better, with fewer bugs, and been far
> less opaque.

Well, there's the rub. "A well written makefile". Can you (or anyone,
really) write a "well-written" makefile that will support all the
systems out there and be easily extensible to new ones? I see that
Philip frequently has to make Makefile changes to support new versions
of existing OSes (to say nothing of new ones) and I suspect that the
knowledge of these differences in already present in autoconf. A posting
on the autoconf list today from the maintainer of GNU sed (which he just
released using a snapshot of autoconf 2.60) reports that a user was able
to build this new version of sed on _45_ different platforms, many of
them using the standard toolchain (i.e. not requiring GNU compilers). I
find that pretty impressive.

Your experience above mentions "cross-compiling": can you even do that
with Exim's build system today, if the cross-compile is anything more
complex than just a different processor of the same architecture on the
same operating system? I'm honestly asking, I've never tried it and
don't have the toolchains here to try it with :-)