Re: Cocotron used for a real-world app

[Fred Kiefer]

Markus Hitter wrote:
> 
> Am 02.11.2008 um 23:58 schrieb Fred Kiefer:
> 
>> Doing a configure for cross compilation is bound to fail
> 
> Why? My gcc experience is a bit dated, but in the Mac OS X 10.0 days,
> gcc could configure for cross-targets almost fine already. What you need
> is a copy of the foreign (MinGW-)environment, of course.
> 
> The difficult part is to distinguish between binaries meant to run in
> the build process (helper tools) and binaries meant to run on the other
> architecture. But gcc's configure has mechanisms to deal with this in
> place, even if they might be somewhat buggy (rarely tested).
> 
> I can't see a reason why GNUstep's configure couldn't do this as well.
> 

The big difference between gcc and GNUstep is that the former doesn't
rely heavily on external libraries. So configuring gcc itself for cross
compilation isn't that hard. For GNUstep we need to know a lot more
about the environment is is compiled in.

I would say there are cases which will work and others that wont. We use
configure to find out about installed libraries and headers, this might
work, but we also try to find out whether some functions are actually
provided by those libraries and working. To do so configure needs to
build and run short code fragments and the later part just wont work.
What is possible is to provide the correct values as configure command
line arguments, but then already providing the full config.h file for
Windows might be easier.

On the other hand, my experience with cross compilation is a bit dated
as well and they may be better way to do this now.

Fred