Re: Canadian Cross Compiling Issues

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Ranjit" == Ranjit Mathew <rmathew@hotmail.com> writes:

Ranjit> IMHO, the libgcj tests for Native/Cross/Canadian-Cross are a
Ranjit> little broken

I'm not too surprised.  A little work was done in this area recently,
but probably more remains.

Ranjit> For example, the GCC 3.2 libjava/configure script needs
Ranjit> an explicit --with-cross-host flag (so does the current
Ranjit> script)

The top-level configure should provide this.
How are you configuring?

Ranjit> I will post my diffs to the GCC 3.2 libjava configure and
Ranjit> Makefile.in that finally allowed me to build libgcj and
Ranjit> related tools properly.

Please do.

Ranjit> And in the current CVS, we bother checking for a Canadian Cross
Ranjit> only if --with-newlib has been specified and then again, only
Ranjit> if --with-cross-host has been specified.

Before the most recent change in this area, we assumed that a cross
build meant that we wanted to use newlib, and then we skipped a lot of
tests.  Of course, this wasn't a good assumption.  It looks like
you've discovered a bug still lurking in there though.

Ranjit> As yet another example, the fastjar configure script in GCC 3.2
Ranjit> dies out if I am building a Canadian Cross with a message like
Ranjit> "can not run test when cross compiling" (for testing sizeof char).

This is fixable, you just need to import the cross-friendly sizeof
test code.  You can find it in libffi's configury.  Also gcc's, I
think.

Ranjit> I feel that we are unnecesarily combining the issues related
Ranjit> to cross compiling (and canadian cross compiling) per se and
Ranjit> compiling to embedded targets which might not have a C library
Ranjit> (or only a minimal one like newlib).

Yes, that was how it was originally written.  Back when I wrote this
code (it must have been 1998), host-x-host builds were pretty unusual.
Also, I only needed things to build for a particular target (an
OS-less, newlib-using MIPS platform).  So that's what I made work.
Now we're slowly cleaning up the old mess.

Tom