Building ARM ports (was Re: Globalscale Dreamplug and 8.3 RELEASE)

[Adrian Chadd]

On 15 August 2012 07:10, Ian Lepore <freebsd at damnhippie.dyndns.org> wrote:

>> I have the basics, and have for years.  I've posted them several times.  The trouble is that they are very very basic and need more work.  I think you'll need to define the problem a little better before progress can be made.

Right.

> The system we use at work is basically Warner's (at least I think he put
> the bulk of it in place years ago).  It involves defining a bunch of
> environment variables that change how ports are built (I want to say
> "fools" or "tricks" the ports into using cross-tools, but the negative
> implications of those words may just reflect my ignorance of the
> details).

Right.

> The biggest problem we have is build versus run dependencies.  When
> crossbuilding port foo to run on arm, that port decides it needs the
> compile_a_foo port to build the code, so it goes off and cross-builds
> compile_a_foo, then wants to run the resulting arm binaries on the x86
> host.  The only way I know of to fix that is to tediously identify and
> pre-build all the build-time requirements needed by any port you intend
> to cross-build.  Ports that have their own build systems and custom
> tools are essentially impossible to work with.

Well we have build tools as a make stage in building things in
/usr/src. I know, I keep adding things to it when adding stuff for
cross-building things.

So if we know _how_ to mark something as a build time versus run time
dependency, wouldn't that be good to add to the ports infrastructure?

Yes, we can't cross-build _all_ports. But a bunch of basic ones to
begin with would be nice (eg things like thttpd, dropbear.) Ports with
their own build systems and custom tools can stay out of it for this
pass.

I was hoping that others with a little more build experience could be
coaxed into hacking on the problem. I find it really disenheartening
that the OpenWRT peeps figured this out years ago and yet we can't
even make a _start_ on it in /usr/ports.



Adrian