Re: What's up with "fontconfig"

[Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>]

On Fri, 2013-02-01 at 15:56 +0100, Mike Looijmans wrote:
> When compiling fontconfig, it fails because it is using "build" flags in 
> the host compiler. I have BUILD_OPTIMIZATIONS="-march=native ..." set, 
> and fontconfig will fail to compile because it passes the -march=native 
> flag to the ARM compiler which then fails. Which is justified.
> 
> This is the part in the recipe that worries me:
> 
> do_configure_append () {
> 	sed -i 's|LDFLAGS =.*|LDFLAGS =|' fc-case/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|LDFLAGS =.*|LDFLAGS =|' fc-glyphname/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|LDFLAGS =.*|LDFLAGS =|' fc-lang/Makefile
> 
> 	sed -i 's|CFLAGS =.*|CFLAGS =${BUILD_CFLAGS}|' fc-case/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|CFLAGS =.*|CFLAGS =${BUILD_CFLAGS}|' fc-glyphname/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|CFLAGS =.*|CFLAGS =${BUILD_CFLAGS}|' fc-lang/Makefile
> 
> 	sed -i 's|CPPFLAGS =.*|CPPFLAGS =${BUILD_CPPFLAGS}|' fc-case/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|CPPFLAGS =.*|CPPFLAGS =${BUILD_CPPFLAGS}|' fc-glyphname/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|CPPFLAGS =.*|CPPFLAGS =${BUILD_CPPFLAGS}|' fc-lang/Makefile
> 
> 	sed -i 's|CXXFLAGS =.*|CFLAGS =${BUILD_CXXFLAGS}|' fc-case/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|CXXFLAGS =.*|CFLAGS =${BUILD_CXXFLAGS}|' fc-glyphname/Makefile
> 	sed -i 's|CXXFLAGS =.*|CFLAGS =${BUILD_CXXFLAGS}|' fc-lang/Makefile
> 
> }
> 
> This is not a "native" package. The above commands put the build systems 
> include patch and compiler flags into the makefile.
> 
> I've worked around the issue by creating a a bbappend that simply 
> removes "-march=native" from the build flags, which makes the build of 
> this package succeed.
> 
> I have no idea what fontconfig is supposed to do and where it is 
> supposed to run, but it looks to me as if that configure_append should 
> not be there at all.

This does look rather worrying and Ross mentioned this to me but wasn't
able to find the history. I was more successful and ironically this was
introduced by Ross:

http://git.yoctoproject.org/cgit.cgi/poky/commit/?id=c2d22f0f36980eecc7cf2ad818a5033476614bfc

We likely need to replace this with something sane. The question is
whether we need it at all and if so, what problem dies it solve?

Cheers,

Richard