Re: cross-compiling

[Ben Pfaff]

"Michel Boaventura" <address@hidden> writes:

> Im graduating on computer science, and all of my works on my disciplines where
> made to compile only using makefiles and nothing else. And my only tools where
> Vim, gcc and gdb.
> I saw that pspp is made with a lot of sofisticated tools, like
> ./configure and so on.
> My doubts are: What is the advantages of use it, and do not make just
> a makefile?

How many platforms and platform variations were your projects
expected to build and run successfully on?  How many compilers,
kernels, libraries, and other kinds of configuration were they
expected to support on each of those platforms?  My guess is that
the answer is "one of each", or perhaps two or three in a few
cases.

PSPP and most GNU software is intended to run on a wide variety
of platforms, both new and old, and to automatically adapt itself
to whatever compiler, kernel, and libraries are available.  This
takes more sophisticated mechanisms than can be portably obtained
with a straightforward Makefile.

> Do you guys use some IDE to make pspp, and how do you manage
> all of those tools?

I use Emacs, which I do not think most people would consider to
be an IDE.
-- 
Ben Pfaff 
http://benpfaff.org