[Nix-dev] Re: libgmp impurity

[Marc Weber]

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 06:58:10PM +0200, Peter Simons wrote:
> The gmp library in stdenv-updates uses plain GNU config.guess now. This
> should remedy overly aggressive choice of optimizer flags. 
> 
> My understanding is that there is no trivial solution to the underlying
> problem, though. Configure scripts usually guess a lot, and that's
> [..]

Maybe we should talk about solutions even if we can't implement them at
the moment?

a) patch the config.guess script.
     can be easy but won't catch everything

b) patch the stuff config.guess is using
     requires patching gcc and assembler because the CPUID processor
     instruction can't be faked. Thus gcc and the assemblers must be
     taught to rewrite this instruction by a set of instruction returning a
     constsant but similar string.

c) cross compile everything from x86 to x86 or such.
     I guess too much work. cross compiling can cause a lot of problem
     because the majority of packages isn't cross compiled often except the
     most basic ones (?)

Can you think about other solutions?

Marc Weber