Re: how to not break cross-building

[Mike Miller]

On Thu, Apr 28, 2016 at 13:24:23 +0200, Olaf Till wrote:
> In building package documentation, when the package is not yet
> installed, the cleanest way for extracting help strings from C++ code
> seems to be to compile a (minimalistic) binary which outputs this help
> string. In this way, all special characters in the C-string are
> treated as they should be.
> 
> This certainly will break cross-building if the cross-compiler is used
> to compile the minimalistic binary. But any native C-compiler would
> serve, it only has to evaluate the C-string correctly and call
> 'printf'. I have no practical experience with cross-building, I only
> care for it because I know others want to do it with packages. Is
> there a way to specifiy, in the Makefile, that for a certain step a
> native compiler should be used, not the cross-compiler?

I am actually not familiar with the minimalistic binary approach.

In Octave's build system, the C++ preprocessor is used to extract the
docstrings from all source files, which are then inserted into the
manual and used to build the doc-cache file. I think that a
cross-preprocessor would be just as effective as a native preprocessor.

In the communications package, a Perl script parses all *.cc and *.m
files to extract docstrings for insertion into the Texinfo manual.

-- 
mike