Re: Cross compiling texinfo-4.7

[Stepan Kasal]

Hello,
        thank you for the idea and for the patch.

On Tue, Oct 05, 2004 at 02:47:22PM +0100, Mark Fortescue wrote:
> texinfo-4.7 does not cross compile as it uses programs compiled with the
> 'host' compiler (CC) which as a result probably will not work.

this problem was discussed here a few months ago.

If you are interested, you could go to archives from
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-texinfo

The resolution back then was that the following simple strategy is enough:

1) if not crosscompiling, use the tools just build, no change here
2) if crosscompiling, use the installed tools

This means that before cross-compiling texinfo, you have to have texinfo
installed in the build environment.  The configure script should check for
that; it should probably even require that the version of texinfo installed
is the same as we are going to cross compile.

We agreed that this solution would not clutter the configure.ac and
Makefile.am code so much as the binutils/gcc-style bootstrapping.

I vaguely remember that the proposal was acompanied by some patches but
I don't know whether it materialized.  You could also see that in the archive.
And, of course, check the CVS on savannah.gnu.org to see the current code.

If my description of the situation is incomplete, Karl Berry (the texinfo
maintainer) will probably correct me soon.

Are you willing to work more on your patch?

Perhaps you could try to convince us that we should adopt your solution.
(We need that native build works as before, without complications, but
that can probably be achieved by a few conditionals...)

Or I might have convinced you to adopt the simple approach outlined above.
Then you could find out whether the code is already in CVS, and if not,
finish it and submit the resulting patch.  (I'm sorry, I don't know how the
situation currently looks like.  Hopefully, Karl will tell you the details.)

Thank you for your work,
        Stepan Kasal