Re: different hosts in subprojects

[Bernd Jendrissek]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Ineiev <address@hidden> wrote:
> I try to mount my project on Autoconf.
>  it has very heterogeneous software parts, e.g.
>
>  (1) fat POSIX host (typically HOST=BUILD=`config.guess')
>  (2) ARM-based microcontroller without external memory
>   (I am used to build tools with arm-elf- prefix)
>  (3) little AVR appendices.
[snip]
>  Also, I am afraid that recursion may trigger some issues
>  of caching and regenerating configure scripts.
>
>  What is the right way to autoconfiscate such projects?

At my previous job I had a similar problem - most of the code had to
be compiled with TopSpeed C, but there were also some utilities that
ran on my build host (I ran TopSpeed C's command-line compiler in a
dosemu box, which I controlled through a pair of FIFOs).  With some
shell / batch file magic I was able to get "./configure
--host=unknown" to generate a config.h for the DOS / TopSpeed C
environment, that I then renamed and kept as a precious artifact.
After another "./configure --host=`config.guess`" my build tree was
back to native building.

Luckily for me, TopSpeed C had its own build system, so I just needed
to tell it (via the FIFOs) to do its equivalent of "make all".  The
rest of the project, whose $host was equal to $build, was under the
control of automake.  What sort of build system do you have for the
ARM and AVR stuff right now?

Another data point is GCC, which uses sub-configures to build the
target libraries.

I'm not sure there IS a "right way" to autoconfiscate these sort of
projects that involve compilers for more than one target.