Re: [musl] Re: OS detection wrong on Alpine Linux 3.10

["Laurent Bercot" <ska-dietlibc@skarnet.org>]

>>  I'm not trying to tell you you're not a grown-up programmer. I'm
>>  trying to tell you that the answer to the question you're asking ("is
>>  this musl?") is not meaningful for achieving what you presumably want
>>  to achieve -- assisting the program using autoconf tests in
>>  automatically producing a build that works on the intended host.
>
>That assumes a project is Autotools based.

  No, it does not. It assumes that the project's authors are attempting
to produce a working project, including detection of implementation-
defined behaviour wherever the project relies on them. "autoconf tests"
is a shortcut that means "tests performed at build time that do such
detection", because autoconf is the most widely known program that
produces such tests and everyone understands the expression.

  But it doesn't mean that a project has to use autotools. My projects
don't, and never will; however, they do perform feature detection at
build time, because it's necessary for what they do.

  If a project relies on implementation-defined behaviour and does not
perform detection, then it is broken and needs to be fixed. If its
build system does not allow it to perform detection, then it needs to
switch to a better build system. As you say, autotools is a mess, but
it at least gets this part right (more or less - it does cross-building
wrong because by default it assumes target behaviours it cannot detect,
instead of asking the user). I very much hope other build systems are
capable of doing the same. If not, that's, for once, functionality they
should grow, because it's useful.

--
  Laurent