In such a case, the host and target machines for the program may be different. The configure script should normally treat the specified type of system as both the host and the target, thus producing a program which works for the same type of machine that it runs on. This specifies the host system without changing the type of target system. The syntax for hosttype is the same as described above. Bootstrapping a cross-compiler requires compiling it on a machine other than the host it will run on.
Some programs have ways of configuring themselves automatically.
If your program is set up to do this, your configure script can simply ignore most of its arguments.