Re: Cross-compiling GNUstep?

[David Chisnall]

On 28 Sep 2011, at 07:58, Fred Kiefer wrote:

> On 27.09.2011 20:09, David Chisnall wrote:
>> HP has kindly sent me a TouchPad to play with, so I wanted to run
>> GNUstep on it.   I've managed to get clang to use their cross-build
>> toolchain, but I'm having problems with the configure script for
>> -base.  It just aborts if you're cross compiling.
>> 
>> Am I the first person to try cross-compiling GNUstep?  I was fairly
>> sure Nikolaus had done this before.  Is there an easy way to tell the
>> configure thing 'really, I know what I'm doing, just trust me...' and
>> have it assume that the test programs will work?  I can always tweak
>> configure options until they actually later...
> 
> Nikolaus Schaller isn't using GNUstep itself. He has his own fork mySTEP and 
> to my knowledge he uses XCode to do the compilation for the different 
> environments. As he only needs to support a few well controlled target 
> systems, he gets along without all these compilcated configure scripts we are 
> using.
> I tried myself to cross compile GNUstep ages ago and failed. One problem was 
> that gnustep-make was using the terms host/build/target in a different order 
> than the cross compilation standard. No idea whether Nicola fixed that.

The 'standard' definition is somewhat unintuitive, but it seems that -make now 
uses the correct values.

> I agree with Richard that it is probably best to just generate the results of 
> autoconf in a different way and use these then. I created them manually at 
> that time. It would help to document what gets changed by the configure step.

I've poked the configure script a lot now and basically disabled all of the 
executable tests when it detects that you're cross-compiling.  I now have a 
pretty minimal GNUstep (no ICU, no XML, no SSL) building on the Mac for 
deployment on WebOS.

My aim with this is to get the native GNUstep .so talking to Objective-C that's 
been compiled down to JavaScript with my clang plugin.

David


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