Re: Cross-compiling

[Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu>]

On 2/5/20 7:45 AM, David Michael wrote:
> Does anyone familiar with the build process see problems with this?  Is
> it something that would be acceptable upstream?

Something along those lines should be acceptable, I'd think.

I assume you're building from a tarball, and not from Git. If you are 
building from Git, then the first step should be to build a tarball 
natively, and then start from the tarball. This should simply any 
cross-build support we need to add.

make-docfile shouldn't be needed native, as we can distribute its output 
as part of the tarball.

For blessmail, we can convert it to a shell script on platforms that 
have a shell (which should be the only platforms where cross-building is 
an issue.) Blessmail is obsolete anyway - perhaps we should start 
installing blessmail only on explicit request - but I digress.

For make-fingerprint, it's not that important and we could make its use 
optional. Or we could write a shell script a la blessmail. Or we could 
convert it from C to Elisp and integrate it as part of the build 
process. Either way, we wouldn't need to build it on the build host.

If we do the above, we wouldn't need to worry so much about native vs 
cross-builds.