[cairo] Flag for FP-challenged platforms

[Carl Worth]

On Thu, 30 Nov 2006 12:13:18 +0000, Damon Chaplin wrote:
> I'd go for --optimize-for-no-fpu
>
> Then some random developer like me might understand what its for.

That's among the best descriptions so far for what we're talking about
here. The bug is that autoconf only allows us to provide feature
options starting with --enable or --disable and those are totally
wrong.

We don't want the user to be selecting what code to compile, (--enable
and --disable work pretty well for that, and we use that well for
selecting backends).

Here, we want the user to specify something about the capabilities of
the target system, and then let cairo figure out which code to use.

Speaking of which, in all other similar cases we try to automatically
detect system capabilities rather than make the user select, (and even
then, to manually select the user doesn't use configure options but
goes through some awkward hoop of priming a cache file). I don't think
that awkward cache priming is a good thing, (another autoconf bug
there). But would it be too crazy to write code to figure out which
paths to choose?

I mean, we're talking about cairo wanting to select between different
code paths based on their performance characteristics. Why not just
have the build system compile, run, and measure both rather than
making the user decide?

Insane?

-Carl

PS. But anyway, Dan, please go forward with the best command-line
option you've seen so far. You're doing the work so you make the call,
(and code in hand is preferred over some crazy idea with no
code---such as automatically detecting something floating-point
performance).
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