[Gnushogi-devel] Cross-compiling master

[Yann Dirson]

I made some progress with cross-compilation of the master branch.

The largest issue is that the build procedure curently needs to run
executables it just built:

* pat2inc to generate *-pattern.inc
* gnushogi itself to compile the textbook binary format

My first idea was to directly do the Right Thing (tm), and build
native binaries to be run on the build machine.  Autotools has bad
support for this currently, and although I have started to work on a
patch to automake to make things better, that won't help us
immediately.

I was more succesful by changing things so that pattern.inc files are
generated at "make dist" time, which solves the first issue.  However,
I had to use a GNU make feature for this (order-only dependencies), so
this is likely to need some adjustments.

I'm not yet decided on the binary book generation, however.  It's
quite clear that currently it needs to be run on the target system.
OTOH, given the less than 0.5s it takes to build it, it is surely
overkill to do anything complicated here, and I guess I'll just skip
this entirely - and consider whether it's even a good idea to keep
binbook support at all.


I have pushed a wip/cross branch to savannah, with which I was able to
cross-build win32 binaries with mingw on a Debian system (although I
did not test them yet).  Just a matter of passing the
--host=i686-w64-mingw32 flag to ./configure, and you should just get
the .bbk build failure.  The .bbk build may even not fail at all, if
this cross-build occurs, say on cygwin.

This branch should be trivially mergeable with wip/xboard, to build
winboard-compatible binaries.  Feedback welcomed :)