Re: rfc/rfh: i686-w64-mingw32 cross target

[Ludovic Courtès]

Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> skribis:

> Ricardo Wurmus writes:
>
>> I think these are the only patches I needed.  Could you give an example
>> of what things need to be patched for mingw?
>
> The two top commits here are for ncurses and readline
>
>     https://github.com/janneke/guix/tree/wip-hurd+mingw

Sorry for the delay, but this is awesome work!  I’m impressed that you
got it working in so little time.

I’m not offering a full review yet.  I think it’s an additional
incentive to finally merge the remaining bits from wip-hurd.  ;-)

My main concern is the complexity of the cross-base stuff.  Why is
‘cross-gcc-core’ needed, for instance?  It’s probably inevitable for the
complexity to be proportional to the number of target libcs, but I think
we should start thinking about how to master this complexity by
factoring/abstracting things a bit.

A cosmetic comment: I’d put the MinGW packages in a separate module.

> (work in progress).  Typically: configure flags, adding gnulib modules,
> gnulib updates, dealing with non-posix or mingw-specific libc stuff.
>
> Many more examples here
>
>     https://github.com/janneke/gub/tree/master/patches

I think portability patches should be (1) submitted upstream ;-), and
(2) applied unconditionally on all architectures (assuming they do not
make any difference on the other architectures.)

‘core-updates’ is open, so now is a good time to add patches to the
toolchain packages, for instance.  :-)

Thanks!

Ludo’.