Re: Cross compiling PARI/what about autoconf?

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

Karim Belabas wrote:
> 2) it's a non-trivial project with dubious advantages (cross-compiling)

I think the advantages are more than just cross-compiling:
1) configure is something which everybody knows how to use.  I regularly 
compile various programs from source and I can just run configure 
without thinking.  But with PARI, I always have to think how to pass 
compiler options for example.
2) From 1) it follows that it would also make the life easier of the 
Linux|Unix distributions.  If your program is really easy to compile and 
install, I hope that more software distributions will package PARI.
3) I noticed that a lot of checks in PARI use things like #ifdef UNIX or 
#ifdef __GNUC__, instead of checking for the features that you want.  So 
these things should be changed, and then you might as well use GNU 
configure for that.

Cheers,
Jeroen