Opinions requested

[Harold Grovesteen <h dot grovsteen at tx dot rr dot com>]

The toolchain build process has always been a black art to me.  
crosstool-NG has brought this to the average developer such as myself.  
Most my development is on the Hercules mainframe emulator, hence the 
s390 contributions.  One of the other developers has been working on 
enabling ELF executable support in one of the legacy mainframe operating 
systems.  He has shared with me his build process.  It is amazingly 
simple and I used it myself to build a toolchain.

A few up front comments to provide some context.  Yes, the toolchain is 
statically built.  A separate C-library has been provided with a few 
functions where needed.  The actual OS interface will be that provided 
by the legacy operating system, also separately created, and compiled 
and linked with the executable.  This is not a standard POSIX 
interface.  Plans for shared libraries in this environment are unclear.

What I am seeking here is an assessment from those much more 
knowledgable about the process, the pros and cons, and is it worth 
integrating into crosstool-NG.  For that I would be willing to do the 
work.  I realize this might be a special case with very limited 
applicability, but it is so simple and easily created I thought I would 
bring it up here.  I have never seen a crosstool build this simple.  If 
it is, maybe it should be documented somewhere.  What's the gotcha?

My suspicion is that glibc and Linux bring the complexity to the build 
process.  Once those two elements are removed from the process (as this 
does), it becomes straight forward.  And those two elements missing from 
this process might also be what relegates it to a niche application.

Build binutils:

../../src/binutils-2.20/configure 
--prefix=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/run --target=s390-linux \
    --enable-install-libbfd
make -j
make -j install

Build gmp:

../../src/gmp-5.0.1/configure 
--prefix=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup --disable-shared
make -j install

Build mpfr:

../../src/mpfr-3.0.0/configure --prefix=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup \
            --with-gmp=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup --disable-shared
make -j install


Build mpc:

../../src/mpc-0.8.2/configure --prefix=/home/ivan/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup \
           --with-mpfr=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup \
           --with-gmp=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup \
           --disable-shared
make -j install

Build gcc:

../../src/gcc-4.5.1/configure \
   --prefix=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/run \
   --target=s390-linux \
   --enable-languages="c" \
   --with-newlib \
   --disable-threads \
   --without-headers \
   --disable-shared \
   --with-gmp-include=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup/include \
   --with-gmp-lib=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup/lib \
   --with-mpfr-include=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup/include \
   --with-mpfr-lib=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup/lib \
   --with-mpc-include=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup/include \
   --with-mpc-lib=/home/xxxx/hercules/c4vm/cross/sup/lib
make -j all-gcc
make -j install-gcc



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