Cross compiling with autotools

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For casablanca, I need to get libxml++ cross compiled via Emscripten.

Upon trying I very soon fail since autoconfig wrongly checks for the compiler building a default executable (which would be wrong too for e.g. Android-ARM).

I try to configure via:

emconfigure ./configure --host=i386-pc-linux-gnu --enable-static=yes --enable-shared=no CPPFLAGS="`empkg-config --cflags libxml-2.0`" LIBS="`empkg-config --libs libxml-2.0`"

But it fails with:

checking whether the C++ compiler works... no

configure: error: in `/libxml++/2.36.0':

configure: error: C++ compiler cannot create executables

My question is whether someone could walk me through how to modify your autotools setup or whether it might be better to fork libxml++ and to build it using SCons.