From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Woodhouse Subject: Re: cross-compiling alternatives (was Re: [PATCH 0/1] Embedded Maintainer(s)...) Date: Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:37:35 +0100 Message-ID: <1213288655.26255.168.camel@pmac.infradead.org> References: <1209577322.25560.402.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <200806102235.09598.rob@landley.net> <484F66F8.4020409@snapgear.com> <200806111941.51221.rob@landley.net> <48513F5A.6010008@am.sony.com> <1213285831.26255.152.camel@pmac.infradead.org> <20080612160845.GB9327@linux-sh.org> <48514E9A.3080901@billgatliff.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <48514E9A.3080901@billgatliff.com> Sender: linux-embedded-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Bill Gatliff Cc: Paul Mundt , Tim Bird , Rob Landley , Greg Ungerer , Sam Ravnborg , Leon Woestenberg , linux-embedded@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 2008-06-12 at 11:28 -0500, Bill Gatliff wrote: > Guys: > > > If you opt to cross-compile, having to deal with those > > sorts of things is the price you pay. > > > If the build system derives from autoconf, then a hacked-up config.cache (or > equivalent command-line args) often solves problems for me. Just give the cache > the answers that it would otherwise have to get by running code on the target > machine. > > That's how emdebian is doing a bunch of their stuff, and I have to admit that it > works pretty darned well. It's also handy for configuration management, since > the cache file itself is plaintext and therefore svn/git/bzr/cvs/...-friendly. Yeah, I was building Red Hat Linux packages for sh3 many years ago, using tricks like that. But there was always _something_ else going wrong, however much you hacked around it. And a lot of it would only turn up at runtime, not build time. I would never consider shipping a product with a large number of userspace packages cross-compiled. For minimal file systems with a select handful of tools which can be tested exhaustively, it's not so bad. But for any 'full-featured' userspace, I think cross-compilation is completely insane. -- dwmw2