configure breaks when cross-compiling

[jonathan-geisler]

The configure script tries to build a program that it can execute to determine the compiler version being used. This does not work properly when cross-compiling because the executable cannot run on the host machine. There needs to be a way to provide this information when cross compiling so that this step can be avoided. Maybe do something like ${CC} --version and parse the output there since the compiler must execute on the host?

[sbahra]

Makes sense. Will look into addressing this and otherwise happy to take patches sooner!

[sbahra]

@jonathan-geisler One thing I forgot to mention: Cross-compilation is usually done today using build profiles. See the --profile option. If you're blocked on this, you may want to take this route. This removes the need to do a lot checks as well. Does this work for your use-case?

Parsing compiler version output is a bit of a PITA given the number of supported compilers, it also becomes a maintenance burden as more compilers are supported, but I'll check for feasibility of it.

[jonathan-geisler]

I am not blocked because I was able to make this change to the code:

#COMPILER=`./.` 2> /devnull`
COMPILER="gcc" # hack to allow cross-compiling

The --profile option could work in the long run, but it doesn't get checked until after this line of code, so it is not quite enough to fix the problem permanently.

[igorpupkinable]

Parsing compiler version output is a bit of a PITA given the number of supported compilers, it also becomes a maintenance burden as more compilers are supported, but I'll check for feasibility of it.

I am not sure you need to parse compiler output. $CC --version || return 1 or $CC --help || return 1 should be just fine.