Re: [Tinycc-devel] autoconfiscation

[Peter Lund]

On Tue, 2007-08-28 at 20:44 -0500, Rob Landley wrote:

> I don't know if this was one of Fabrice's design goals, but it's certainly 
> one 
> of mine.  Some day I'd like to get a self-bootstrapping system with just four 
> packages:
> 
>   uClibc
>   BusyBox (or ToyBox)
>   linux
>   tcc

I'm sure you (and we) will get there.

> I'm kind of opinionated about how a compiler works.  I think it's no 
> different 
> from a docbook to pdf converter: it takes input and produces output.  If 
> something like xml2 had extensive special cases and configuration for every 
> host machine it ran on, it would be a deeply broken piece of software.
> 
> Yes, having different _targets_ is an interesting thing to configure, because 
> the program is producing different output formats.  But that's unrelated to 
> what host you run it on and NOT YOUR PROBLEM.  "On arm my xml2 produces html, 
> and on PPC it produces pdf, and on mips it produces .PNG files!"  What's 
> wrong with this picture?  Different behavior on different hosts is bad 
> coding.  Cross compiling is NOT SPECIAL.

Pretty much on the mark there.

There are sometimes cases where you would like to use a better API if
it's available, for example for creating temporary files, but it is
often not necessary or even useful.

-Peter