Re: Building on FreeBSD 10+BeagleBone Black (arm)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 2 Jan 2014, at 04:44, "Lundberg, Johannes" <johannes@brilliantservice.co.jp> 
wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> I'm doing some experimenting on the BBB and I managed to build all 
> dependencies for gnustep-make and gnustep-base (natively on the BBB, from 
> FreeBSD ports).
> 
> However, configure on gnustep-base seems to stop at
> 
> checking FFI library usage... 
> 
> # top 
> shows
> 46094 root          1  76    0 10736K  2140K RUN    139:22  90.28% conftest
> but user cpu usage is around 4%.
> 
> Not sure what the script is doing at this time. Is there any known problem 
> with FFI? If so, are there any alternatives? Will gnustep-base run without it?

FFI is pretty much a hard dependency for GNUstep right now if you want to use 
invocations or anything based on them (distributed objects, NSUndoManager etc).

In theory we can do the invocation stuff in other ways (originally we used 
buiultin gcc specific functions), but we've dropped support for them as FFI is 
the mechanism portable to most platforms, and it's active maintained by someone 
else (so we don't need to duplicate someone elses effort).

IMO the best approach to get things working on a new polatform is:
1. get the latest FFI release and try that
2. if that doesn't work, get the current development version and try it
3. last resort ... hack on the latest development version, and ask for help 
from the FFI people, try to interest them in getting it working on your 
platform.  With a bit of luck they'll help out if you can test any changes they 
make for them.  I think there is FFI working for arm and for free bsd, so it's 
likely that getting it working for the combination is not hard for one of their 
developers.