Re: Cross-compilation fails for Ghostscript 09.05

[Didier Link]

Le vendredi 03 janvier 2014 à 09:56 +0100, John Darrington a écrit :
> During some test builds with the GUIX system, it became apparent that,
> for a number of reasons, Ghostscript cannot be cross-compiled like other GNU 
> software.
> 
> The main issue, is that much of configure.ac seems to be using unusual 
> constructs which
> have not been designed for cross builds.  When looking at possible 
> improvements, I saw this
> comment:
> 
>       # We MUST NOT use PKG_CHECK_MODULES since it is a) not a standard
>         # autoconf macro and b) requires pkg-config on the system, which is
>         # NOT standard on ANY OS, including Linux!
> 
> I think this based on several misunderstandings:
> 
> 1.  Although the PKG_CHECK_MODULES is not a "standard" macro, it is shipped 
> in the pkg.m4
>     file with the pkg-config tool which is common on most GNU/Linux OSes 
> today.
> 
> 2.  In fact, the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro DOES NOT require pkg-config to be on 
> the system
>     at the time the macro is processed by Autoconf.  It DOES require 
> pkg-config to be present
>     when the resulting ./configure script is run by the user, but this is 
> also true for the 
>     code which is currently in configure.ac too.
> 
> 3.  Neither the PKG_CHECK_MODULES macro, nor the pkg.m4 file is ever required 
> to be present
>     on the user's system; only that of the Ghostscript maintainers.  It is 
> not required
>     in order to build or configure Ghostscript; only to bootstrap it before 
> making a release.
>     Using PKG_CHECK_MODULES would not add any dependencies for users.
> 
> 
> In view of this, I think that the work-arounds to avoid PKG_CHECK_MODULES are 
> doing more
> harm than good.   Although, I personally, am not a big fan of pkg-config, I 
> think that if
> it is going to be used, then it should be used in the most standard way.  
> Alternatively
> one could avoid pkg-config altogether and use Autoconf's AC_SEARCH_LIBS et 
> al. macros, but
> I think the ghostscript use case is slightly more complex than normal and 
> this would not be
> altogether straightforward.
> 
> 
> Other reasons preventing cross compiling, seem to include the use of hand 
> crafted macros
> to test for endianess (recent autoconf has a reliable macro to do this) and a 
> non-standard variable to represent the native compiler (instead of the 
> standard 
> CC_FOR_BUILD variable).
> 
> 
> Would the Ghostscript maintainer accept a patch fixing these issues?

Hi John,

If you have some ideas to improve the cross compilation of GNU
Ghostcript, I will review your patch with a great pleasure for inclusion
in the next (coming soon) release !

Thanks to pointing this problems.

Best regards

Didier Link
GNU Ghostscript maintainer

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