automake vs. GNU make [LWN.net]

automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 7, 2008 7:15 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861)
In reply to: automake vs. GNU make by vmole
Parent article: LCA: Disintermediating distributions

libtool isn't so bad except for one thing, which makes it unusable.  No support for
cross-compilation.  It's so utterly lame that every part of the GNU build environment
(binutils, gcc, autoconf, automake) is very cognizant of cross-compilation and works very,
very hard to make setting it up and using it as simple as possible... except libtool.

Whenever I see a package come through that uses libtool I absolutely cringe because I know it
will be a huge PITA.

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automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 7, 2008 17:17 UTC (Thu) by stevenj (subscriber, #421) [Link]

That's totally untrue; automake+libtool supports cross-compiling just fine (note that you can hardly use automake for libraries without using libtool, so saying that automake supports cross-compiling but libtool doesn't is a little strange). I use libtool for cross-compiling all the time. (e.g. on one of my projects we cross-compile shared libraries for Windows from GNU/Linux using mingw).

automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 7, 2008 22:57 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

I don't know much about the cross compiling support of autotools.
Do autotools support cross compiling for systems e.g. with 8 bit 
microcontrollers, which maybe don't have an operating system at all ?

Alex

automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 7, 2008 23:23 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

8-bit, I'm not sure. Things like arm-elf (without an OS), sure, and has 
for next to forever.

automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 11, 2008 1:43 UTC (Mon) by GreyWizard (subscriber, #1026) [Link]

Autotools support cross compilation in the abstract: to the extent that they work for one
cross compiling target they should work for any that the underlying compiler can support.  As
for that, GCC does support at least some 8-bit microcontrollers, as attested here:

    http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/2002-08/msg01809.html

automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 11, 2008 8:37 UTC (Mon) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

What about compilers != gcc, e.g. sdcc ?

Alex

automake vs. GNU make

Posted Feb 11, 2008 20:01 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Other compilers are generally supported. autoconf supports anything which 
runs as $CC and supports -g, -o, and -c with the customary meanings; 
automake supports anything with the caveat that dependency analysis may be 
inaccurate without compiler support (said support being a few lines of 
shell script in the depcomp script: if you need it for your compiler, 
please submit a patch!)

libtool's support is necessarily compiler-by-compiler and 
platform-by-platform, and so cannot cover everything (its entire purpose 
being to smooth out variation in the way different compilers and platforms 
create shared objects): nonetheless, on Linux, 1.5.26 supports GCC, KCC, 
Intel C++, the Portland Group's compiler, Compaq C++, and even Sun C, 
although who'd be using that on a Linux box I have no clue. (For a 
complete list of compiler * platform combinations, look in libtool.m4.)

(libtool obviously doesn't support sdcc, since as far as I can tell sdcc 
can't generate PIC code at all :) )