[Gnushogi-devel] Cross-compiling support in master, XBoard support approaching

[Yann Dirson]

Looks like we're there.  I could check that cross-compiling win32 and
win64 binaries from a Debian machine results in exe files that do run
in Wine.  Just tell me if I missed something.

Branch wip/xboard should now be useful as-is to compile
XBoard/Winboard-compatible binaries.  Documentation has been updated
as well.  No problem seen on my side, I'm planning to push the branch
to master sometime this week.


On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 11:36:59PM +0100, Yann Dirson wrote:
> 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 opted for a simpler solution: only generate pat2inc if not
cross-compiling, and avoiding pattern.inc dependending on it in that
case.

> 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.

Binbook support is still there, we only just install the text version.
Gnushogi will generate a binbook anyway at runtime if it has write
permission on the defined location.  Obviously, it would be much
better to use ~/.gnushogi/ rather than the system lib dir by default.