Build Infrastructure changes

[Kelly O'Hair]

CC to Fredrik because I don't think he is getting any email from the OpenJDK aliases, even though he has
his gmail account on them. :^(

On Aug 3, 2011, at 6:39 PM, mark.reinhold at oracle.com wrote:

> 2011/8/3 12:25 -0400, kelly.ohair at oracle.com:
>> ...
>> 
>> The autoconf setup may borrow ideas/patterns from the IcedTea project,
>> and I want to give credit to that team for that work.
> 
> We're going to adopt autoconf?  Really?
> 
> - Mark

Nothing in the build-infra repositories is permanent until we get it all working, we are prepared to
dump a bunch of stuff in and then turn around and undo the whole thing if it doesn't work out.
We are just in a crafting stage right now, using the build-infra area as our sandbox to play in.
But this is looking pretty solid so far, 99% of the credit on this effort goes to Fredrik and Erik,
goal is to get something pushed in by the end of the week.

The customizations to it will come with the closed building where we may need more controlled versions
of compiles/tools/libraries, and also on Solaris and Windows, the configure script may need more
customizations. But for now, we are focusing on OpenJDK.

Both Fredrik and myself are a little new to autoconf, but I think this will work out nicely.
Sometimes after looking at the manuals, we need to look at examples, which is where IcedTea helps.

As Mario mentions in his reply, it helps greatly with cross compilation and I would really like to
see us moving more into a cross compilation world, but slowly. We need to cut down on the number of
systems needed to perform builds.
But there are other benefits too, as Andrew points out, cross compilation is the big one.

-kto