[pabs3]

Autoconf and automake has the best support for cross-compiling there is, everything else is a poor imitation. At least from the perspective of the folks doing Debian's cross-build stuff. With Debian's multi-arch policy, cross-toolchain packages and dpkg-dev/debhelper support for driving common cross-compiling options, plus fixing a ton of edge cases, IIRC more than 50% of Debian packages are now cross-compilable without qemu. Often they are bit-for-bit identical to the native compilation too.

https://wiki.debian.org/CrossCompiling https://crossqa.debian.net/

[kazinator]

A build system has great support for cross compilation when downstream package maintainers don't have to lift a finger to make it work, even though the upstream developer has not even tried cross compiling.

[pabs3]

Its inevitable that upstream devs will use even the best build system incorrectly, resulting in downstream needing to make changes to fix things. This is the reality of what happens with both autotools and every other build system that supports cross compiling.