Porting GNUstep to the RISC-V architecture

[address@hidden]

Hi Fred, Hi Greg,


That Autoconf was too old, was already the right idea, however differently than 
assumed. I'll get to that in a moment. First the good news: I have made 
significant progress in porting GNUstep to RISC-V by making changes to 
Autoconf. Configure is basically working now, although many dependencies for a 
real compilation of GNUstep are still missing. However, I had not installed 
these dependencies before either.

What did I do?

First a checkout of all major GNUstep subprojects:

$ mkdir Sources
$ cd Sources
$ git clone http://github.com/gnustep/tools-make
$ git clone http://github.com/gnustep/libs-base
$ git clone http://github.com/gnustep/libs-back
$ git clone http://github.com/gnustep/libs-gui
$ git clone http://github.com/gnustep/tools-scripts

Then I ran the build script in tools-scripts:

$ ./tools-scripts/compile-all &> compile-all-out.txt

(see attachment)

compile-all-out.txt now revealed that already configure did not run correctly.


---8<---

==== BUILDING WITH GCC
Build command: CCFLAGS= CC=gcc ./configure --prefix=/usr/GNUstep 
--with-layout=gnustep 
====
checking build system type... ./config.guess: unable to guess system type

This script, last modified 2016-04-02, has failed to recognize
the operating system you are using. It is advised that you
download the most up to date version of the config scripts from

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=blob_plain;f=config.guess
and
  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=blob_plain;f=config.sub

If the version you run (./config.guess) is already up to date, please
send the following data and any information you think might be
pertinent to <config-patches@gnu.org> in order to provide the needed
information to handle your system.

config.guess timestamp = 2016-04-02

---8<---


Fred then made changes to configure and configure.ac and sent them to me.

I applied those changes and then ran this command:

$ ./tools-scripts/compile-all &> compile-all-out.1.txt

(see attachment)

It turned out that Fred's changes did not include everything necessary, 
configure failed again (analogous to before).

A closer look at the error messages of configure suggested that especially the 
files config.guess and config.sub had to be replaced:

---8<---

It is advised that you
download the most up to date version of the config scripts from

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=blob_plain;f=config.guess
and
  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=config.git;a=blob_plain;f=config.sub

---8<---

I downloaded both files (and added them to the archive in the attachment) and 
of course replaced these two files with the new variants in tools-make. A 
comparison of the new and old variants brought to light that in the previous 
version of config.guess from 2016-04-02 the term "riscv" does not appear, this 
architecture was at that time at least unknown to Autoconf.

After replacing the config.guess and config.sub files with their more recent 
variants, I ran the following command:

$ ./tools-scripts/compile-all &> compile-all-out.2.txt

(see attachment)

Now configure ran through, however nothing has been built yet, since an ObjC 
compiler is missing on the system.


Kind regards,

        Lars

Attachments.zip
Description: Zip archive