Re: Cross-compilation to GNU and MinGW available

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hello!

On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 06:33:14PM +0200, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Nixpkgs now features a cross-compilation toolchain for GNU
> (aka. GNU/Hurd) from GNU/Linux, using GCC 4.5.0 and a recent Hurd/Mach
> snapshot.

> I’ve added cross-GNU build jobs (called ‘xbuild_gnu’) to Coreutils,
> Patch, and Tar[*], and others may follow, as time permits.  I think it’s
> nice to make sure GNU packages can at least build on, well, GNU.

Yeah, this is great news!


> I’m hoping that eventually people at TU Delft will install GNU on one of
> the build farm machines, which would allow us to build things natively,
> and even run test suites and all.

Be aware that, even though much more stable than a few years ago,
GNU/Hurd systems are not as solid as the GNU/Linux (or other Unix /
Windows / ...) systems we're using every day.  There'll be some regular
maintenance needed to recover hung systems, repair damaged file systems,
etc.

That's why I mostly switched our Public Hurd Boxen,
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/public_hurd_boxen.html>, to run on Xen
Linux machines -- the Linux-based core systems are stable and can be used
for loggin in remotely and do maintenance on the Hurd guest systems.
This works out quite nicely.

> An alternative would be to use VMs
> (Nixpkgs already provides some support for that.)

That's good, and it's the approach that I favor.  (Unfortunately, I'm
totally out of time, so currently can't realize it myself.)  My plan is
to cross-compile a complete system (as you're now doing), assemble a root
file system from that, add some script machinery, boot the thing in a VM,
and then run some regression tests in there: configure && make && make
check for coreutils, gdb, etc.


> In related news, a cross-compilation toolchain for MinGW is also
> available.  Let me know if you’re interested in it.

Personally, I'm not ;-), but I'm sure others are.


Regards,
 Thomas

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