Re: [Mingw-cross-env-list] non mingw target difficulty estimate

[Volker Grabsch]

Don Bright schrieb:
> Dear MXE
> 
> First, thanks for your excellent project. It enabled OpenSCAD to ship win64
> binaries for the new release.
> 
> I have a question on the feasability of a non-mingw TARGET. I am interested
> in cross-building target i686-pc-linux-gnu binaries from an ARM-based build
> machine.
> 
> What is the level of difficulty on a scale from one to ten (most)? Thanks.

I'm not sure if you should use MXE at all (or any other cross
compiling environment, for that matter).

MXE builds lots of libraries for "hostile" environments where
those libraries aren't available.

When targeting "friendly" environments, you can (and should)
simply use the libraries provided by those systems. If you
want to minimize dependencies, you can ship copies of all
the libraries you need, but note that this may have security
disadvantages. (although not as bad as with static linking,
because the user can easily replace the libraries *.so files
with newer versions.)

So on these system, you have only two steps to go: 1) Build
a cross compiler, and 2) Cross compile your application.
Maybe there's a step 1b) for creating some pkg-config stuff.

You could certainly use MXE for step 1), but that would
be just a tiny part of MXE. However, building all your
dependencies with MXE doesn't make any sense on those
platform. And that may indeed cause some trouble, as many
packages are built with Windows specific patches in MXE.
You almost certainly don't want these patches when targeting
systems like i686-pc-linux-gnu.


Regards,
Volker

-- 
Volker Grabsch
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