Re: Cross-compiling GNUstep?

[Fred Kiefer]

On 29.12.2013 13:56, David Chisnall wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> I'm trying to cross-compile GNUstep, and since I'm sure I'm not the first 
> person to try this, I wondered if anyone had written up how to do it?  I am 
> trying to build from FreeBSD/amd64 for FreeBSD/MIPS64.  I have a 
> cross-compiler and sysroot setup.  Building the runtime was trivial - just 
> point cmake at the cross-compile toolchain file - what do I need to do for 
> Make / base so that:
> 
> - It knows that I don't actually want -make on the target platform.
> - I get an installed version somewhere on my local machine that I can copy to 
> a different location on the remote
> - All of the correct cross-compile flags are passed to the compiler
> 
> I think Ivan has been through all of this recently for Android?

Hi David,

you probably know about our wiki page on this subject
http://wiki.gnustep.org/index.php/Cross_Compiling
that isn't all that helpful.

I tried to cross compile GNUstep myself years ago but failed in that
attempt. The two biggest issues I remember where the configure scripts
and GNUstep make. We rely heavily on our configure scripts to figure out
how GNUstep core components should be compiled. The best thing you can
do is copy the configure scripts over to the target system and try to
run them there. Of course this requires all the development tools to be
installed there as well. You then have the resulting configuration files
(different ones for each component when I remember correctly) that you
copy back to the cross-compilation environment. You could of course rely
on autoconf to sort things out for you, but it didn't work for me or try
to guess everything yourself :-(

The problem with GNUstep make as I remember it was that it had a
somewhat different view of the host/build/target triple than any other
cross compilation system I know of. As a result helper tools get
compiled for the target environment but will get run during the build.

The best instructions I can find at the moment are in the INSTALL file
of make.

Hope this helps,
Fred