Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture [LWN.net]

Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture

Posted Mar 22, 2012 10:04 UTC (Thu) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)
In reply to: Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture by slashdot
Parent article: Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture

BTW, in case they are worried about it, if a build system tries to execute a program it builds (= it's broken)

Out of interest, what's "broken" about writing the parsers that turn your human-readable data into the deliverable binaries in lex and yacc instead of $runtime_parsed_language (and would you care to explain it to the Nethack Dev Team)?

(Log in to post comments)

Fedora mulls ARM as a primary architecture

Posted Mar 22, 2012 14:05 UTC (Thu) by Yorick (subscriber, #19241) [Link]

Indeed. Some of the time, staged builds can be made cross-safe (flex and bison can usually run on the build machine), but not always. For instance, a program that extracts struct member offsets from data structures for use in assembly routines. Or unit tests - fragments of a program that are run during or right after the build to make sure that they work correctly.

Perhaps most of these obstacles can be overcome by interposing an emulator into the build system for the execution of target code, but even with a fully-functional emulator, such an undertaking requires substantial effort and expertise for every package. And running the entire build inside an emulator is likely to be no faster than using native hardware.

I'm not fond of autoconf and its associated tools, but mainly because of their cruftiness (shell scripts, m4 macros) and how they seem to be designed for solving yesterday's problems. A modern software configuration and build system that makes it easy to do cross-buildable packages would be useful.