Re: gnustep-base: cross compiler help

[Adam Fedor]

On Jan 10, 2008, at 6:44 AM, Nicola Pero wrote:
>  core/make/configure --build=xxx host=yyy target=zzz

> And then, it would become natural to use 'host=xxx' everywhere, in  
> configure and make
> arguments, to turn on cross-compilation when using gnustep-make as  
> a compilation
> tool.  This is exactly what the GNU/autoconf standard  
> interpretation requires. :-)
>
> To keep things backwards compatible, we could try to detect 'make  
> target=xxx', print
> a warning, and execute it as if 'make host=xxx' had been specified;  
> the same for
> './configure --target=xxx' which would temporarily emit a warning  
> and be converted
> into './configure --host=xxx'. :-)
>
> Also, we could set GNUSTEP_TARGET_xxx and other variables to be the  
> same as
> GNUSTEP_HOST_xxx so that old GNUmakefiles will keep working. :-)


I'll have to look to see what's going on, but I'm cross-compiling  
GNUstep to make the Windows installer, and I use --host=xxx on  
everything and it works fine (for base I have to use  --with-config- 
file=./GNUstep.conf to fix the "target" issue - I didn't bother to  
fix the code...).   The autoconf documentation is confusing, but it  
seems to recommend using both --build and --host when cross- 
compiling, although specifying --build does not work at all for any  
package I use (even non-GNUstep ones). I'm not sure I'd care that  
much about backward compatibility (except for printing warnings).   
I'd rather that people try to upgrade old makefiles to work correctly  
rather than setting up variables the way we think things should be.

You can see my cross-compile script at

svn+ssh://svn.gna.org/svn/gnustep/tools/installers/trunk/nsis