Re: cross-compiling philosophy

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Thu, 30 Oct 2003, Larry Doolittle wrote:
> > would be responsible for writing the bit of Tcl code required to
> > interface to the target.
>
> I have never used DejaGNU.  I think a lot of embedded development
> systems can download executables and run them, one way or another.

You seem to have a very constrained/idealistic view of an "embedded"
system.  Cygnus developed DejaGNU to be able to handle just about any
embedded system which is accessible via a serial connection or
network.

> I hope I'm never in that situation.  Even if it takes special debug
> hardware, I want my target on-line enough that I can run regression
> tests.  If it's on-line enough for that purpose, it's probably also
> on-line enough for autoconf.
>
> I never presented this as a panacea, only a way to extend the autoconf
> philosophy of "test the features instead of guessing" to include more
> pairs of (tests, cross-compiled targets).  The nice thing is that
> (guessing here) it will be backwards compatible with most existing
> application's config.in files.

I don't think it is worthwhile extending autoconf to handle executing
tests on a remote target unless it is done in a fashion which is as
flexible as DejaGNU.  The support in configure can be trivial.  It is
a matter of defining the right hooks so that the end-user can provide
the rest of the framework required to work with his embedded
environments.

Bob
======================================
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen