Re: Question: Cross compilation

[David Kastrup]

Chris Yate <address@hidden> writes:

> On Mon, 26 Sep 2016 at 19:34 David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>> Chris Yate <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>> > Hi Phil,
>> >
>> > Sigh... Yes, that's basically the conclusion I'd already come to, but
>> that
>> > it seemed such a ludicrous state of affairs that _somebody_ must have a
>> > better solution.
>>
>> If you can find _any_ free software project requiring a number of free
>> software compile- and runtime dependencies that does not invest a really
>> big amount of time into maintaining a separate Windows port, you might
>> want to look how they are doing it.
>>
>
> Thanks David. If the answer to my question is "no, there's no other way",
> that's still a useful answer! :)
>
> To be fair, I think the projects that do work across many systems are
> usually not using C++, but some other language that's more portable.

LilyPond and its utilities use C++, Guile (both as standalone executable
and as one of _many_ libraries), Ghostscript, Python, Shell scripts and
probably a few other things.

C++ alone is not all that hard, except that it does not buy you an
installer.

> Probably something interpreted, or running on a VM.  And of course,
> Lilypond has a bunch of dependencies, TexMf, Guile and the like, which
> may be more of a portability problem than /our/ code.

Maybe, maybe not, but it adds up.  That's what I meant with "a number of
free software compile- and runtime dependencies".

> GUB is a really good idea. But obviously it's not great having to
> compile the whole thing to change a source repository... If its
> authors followed the mentality of Gnu autoconf tools, you'd expect to
> be able to pass some arguments in. I'll look into it a little.

It may well be possible, but I don't really know myself where to get a
good roadmap.

-- 
David Kastrup