Re: GNUstep on Android

[Ivan Vučica]

Hello Mathias,

1) I have tried out your modifications, and the issues are:

--enable-objc-nonfragile-abi

This would be really really nice to have -- except it seems to depend on consistent support for exceptions. That's why you're getting the #error in gnustep-make while I was not getting it. Since I didn't bother looking into getting libffi or exceptions, I won't be adding this flag at this moment.

--with-layout=gnustep

For some reason this breaks build of gnustep-make completely. Since it is completely irrelevant which layout we have on build machine, I won't bother investigating what goes wrong.

--disable-mixedabi

This doesn't break anything so I'll add it.

2) I have modified the script recently to install in ${build_root}/gs-install where build_root is the CWD at the time of starting the build script. The original script was written on a single-purpose VPS so it didn't matter if it conflicted with existing binaries.

3) To me personally, for now, it matters most whether the code does what I expect it to do, not whether there are warnings. So far, in my toy project I recently started, I had more trouble with not getting 'missing symbol' warnings for libpng than anything else :-)

On Mon Mar 31 2014 at 3:26:22 PM, Mathias Bauer <mathias_bauer@gmx.net> wrote:

> Hi Ivan,
>
> first of all, thanks for sharing your work. I think I understand what
> you did, nevertheless following your instructions with just two changes
> (see below), I get an error at the very last step that until now I don't
> understand (mainly because I don't see where it comes from).
>
> Am 30.03.14 23:58, schrieb Ivan Vučica:
> > On Sun, Mar 30, 2014 at 10:50 PM, Mathias Bauer <mathias_bauer@gmx.net
> > <mailto:mathias_bauer@gmx.net>> wrote:
> >
> >
> >     Currently I'm trying to convince the "configure" of gnustep base to use
> >     the Android toolchain and find the freshly built libobjc2 for linking.
> >
> >
> > This *should* work out of the box on a clean Ubuntu 12.04 machine:
> > https://bitbucket.org/ivucica/gnustep-android
> > I don't know how well it'll work on a non-clean machine, and you should
> > definitely open the scripts and see what they're doing. For example, you
> > may want to modify them to avoid downloading another copy of Android SDK
> > and NDK (which is, IIRC, what these scripts will try to do).
>
> I made two small changes: I added the following parameters to the
> configure call of gnustep make:
>
> --enable-objc-nonfragile-abi --with-layout=gnustep
>
> and the following one to the configure call of gnustep base:
>
> --disable-mixedabi
>
> I don't know if they are still needed nowadays, but at least (especially
> because of the old compiler used - clang 3.3) I wanted to make sure that
> this won't create problems. Nevertheless the error in the last step
> happened also when I omitted these changes.
>
> I consider the results a bit "creepy", as "make install" will put
> Android binaries to places where X86 binaries belong, but for the time
> being I can ignore this. I assume that for a proper cross compiling we
> need to set up a kind of "sysroot" where e.g. GNUstep and libobjc2 get
> installed to and where other libraries can find them.
>
> When I build gnustep base, it seems that the exception handling is not
> detected properly:
>
> > ../../Headers/Foundation/NSException.h:48:2: error: "gnustep-base is configured to use 'traditional' exceptions, but you are
> >       building for 'native' exceptions."
> > #error  "gnustep-base is configured to use 'traditional' exceptions, but you are building for 'native' exceptions."
>
> Having a look into the configure output, I detected several scary
> warnings, so all in all I don't think that this is usable now. I will
> continue to investigate this.
>
> Regards,
> Mathias