Re: MinGW cross-compilation support

[Manolis Ragkousis <manolis837@gmail.com>]

Hello everyone,

On 12/07/16 11:36, Ludovic Courtès wrote:
> Hello Guix!
> 
> After all this time I’m happy to report that I’ve finally merged MinGW
> cross-compilation support, woohoo!
> 
> So we should now be able to do:
> 
>   guix build --target=i686-w64-mingw32 guile
> 
> to cross-compile Guile to MinGW.
> 
> Hydra will build the cross-compilation toolchain and some example
> packages.

Yay! Well done!

> 
> Adding a new cross-compilation target is a commitment.  So I hope you
> and others will make sure it remains functional and useful!
> 
> I also think that together with Manolis and everyone else who’s played
> with cross-compilation, we must clean up the mess that this has become.
> ;-)  Namely, we must more clearly separate target-specific things and
> also separate build-side from host-side code (in cross-base.scm).

You are right, now and then cross-compilation breaks with no apparent
reason as the code gets bigger and more complex (especially after adding
non-Linux targets).

I was thinking that maybe we need to abstract and remove all the target
specific from cross-base.scm into new files. I haven't thought about the
actual implementation yet, but it could be something like what I did
with (cross-kernel-headers ...), which simplifies how (cross-libc ...)
chooses which headers to use.

Everyone please share any ideas you have :-)

Manolis