Re: One more ./Configure issue

[Jeroen Demeyer <jdemeyer@cage.ugent.be>]

Karim Belabas wrote:
> * Jeroen Demeyer [2008-10-31 12:33]:
> > the following is an issue which I encountered while doing 32bit/64bit 
> > cross-compiling on a x86_64 GNU/Linux machine:
> >
> > When using linux32 ./Configure, this setting will be forgotten during make. 
> >  Once I have Configured PARI/GP as 32-bits it should remember that during 
> > make instead of checking again (the culprit is the @dir=`config/objdir`; 
> > line in the top-level Makefile).
>
> This is intentional.
>
> (1) To bypass it, just 
>
>   cd <your-objdir> && make <your-target>.
Thanks for this suggestion, I was not aware of this.  I agree it is very 
useful to be able to build different versions from the same source tree.

> (2) The reason for guessing $dir "at runtime" instead of hardcoding it at
> Configure time is that my home directory is mounted identically on a
> large number of different architectures. I can then use the very same
> sources simultaneously on each of these architecture. And just type
> 'Configure' or 'make <my-target>' from my main workdir without bothering
> to go to a specific directory first. This does simplify testing immensely
> ( and I'd rather include everything in a Makefile than depend on
> external scripts/aliases )
>
> I understand it makes cross-compilation slightly more difficult.
> But I'd rather simplify development and testing than cross-compilation.
Well, there are other ways to solve this problem: the "GNU" way is to 
allow configure to be run from a different directory and then build 
everything in the directory where configure was called from.
For example, inside the pari directory the user could create 
directories, say build32 and build64, and then do
../Configure && make
from inside those directories.

It is clear to me that PARI's Configure system has many good features; 
it just annoys me that it does many things in a *different* way than 
autoconf+automake.

Cheers,
Jeroen.