Re: General cross compilation 'problem'.

[Christopher Faylor <cgf at timesys dot com>]

On Sat, Jun 03, 2006 at 12:30:58PM +0200, Robert Schwebel wrote:
>On Fri, Jun 02, 2006 at 11:37:29PM +0200, Leon Woestenberg wrote:
>> This *is* an open-source project plug:
>> 
>> The www.openembedded.org guys have solved this problem.
>
>And, of cause, PTXdist is also a GPLed alternative: 
>
>- http://www.pengutronix.de/software/ptxdist_en.html
>- Modelled after the BuildRoot concept when it started in 2002, but 
>  much improved in the meantime.
>- Kconfig based configuration frontend
>- Very small footprint: it still fits on one disc (if you don't 
>  count the patches).
>- keep-it-simple principle, written in make+bash
>- PC simulation of embedded targets is easily possible (compile a
>  complete target natively instead of cross)
>- community proven and commercially supported
>
>> As with most open-source project, it takes some time digging in before 
>> it starts getting productive, and documentation comes after product.
>
>Well, that's probably the same with all OSS projects :-)
> 
>> This project took me two weeks to fully grasp; I am now happily 
>> cross-building whatever comes at me (toolchains, kernels, root 
>> filesystems, applications) by starting a builder and waiting. About 3000 
>> packages available, ~95% of them cross-compile properly.
>
>We have about >400 packets for PTXdist yet, steadily growing. But the
>pure number was never a goal for us, the PTXdist community does more try
>to work together with the upstream projects and keep the patch load
>small. 
>
>> autoconf, libtool, pkg-config is all handled correctly.
>
>Btw, I would be interested in how you OE guys get libtool right; it
>usually picks up libraries from the host: when you for example call it
>with -lsomelib, libtool makes absolute paths out of it, without caring
>about SYSROOT/DESTDIR. We mostly work around that by changing
>-lsomething into -Wl,-lsomething, but that's only an uggly hack. 

In our tsrpm tool we wrap every call to gcc/ld/ar/as and rewrite the
commands lines that are passed on so that the right library is used.  If
the default handling is not good enough, then you can use shell script
fragments to specify hints, like:

if ispgm target-gcc; then
   modifyargs 's%/usr/lib/libncurses.a%-lncurses%
fi

But, for the majority of packages you should be able to just grab a
source rpm, extract it, and build it for a given target, i.e.:

tsrpm --build --target=armv5l tcp_wrapers.spec

tsrpm is GPLed and available from the site I mentioned previously:

http://crossdev.timesys.com/

The tool is under active development and, again, we welcome feedback.

cgf

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