Re: cygport cross-compiling beta1

["Yaakov (Cygwin/X)" <yselkowitz at users dot sourceforge dot net>]

On Tue, 2010-07-20 at 00:53 -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
> But at SOME point, SOME part of what you've built on $host is supposed
> to be used, eventually, by somebody, on $target, right?
> 
> Where should THAT live?
> 
> If I'm on linux and have a devel environment, I can always compile with
> --prefix=/home/me/my-builds even if I don't have root.  But...with this
> cross.cygchain, I can't do that from my cross-host; I'm trapped in the
> thou-shalt-have-root prison and to USE anything I build, I *must* build
> with --prefix=/usr -- and then I can't use it on the $target without
> root privilege.
> 
> rpm-build doesn't restrict you that way; sure, it *defaults* to /usr,
> but you CAN override (yes, there are issues on the 'rpm --install' side
> wrt. root, but there are also workarounds for that).  I'm not sure about
> ebuild, but I *think* you can override it, too.
> 
> Why shouldn't cygport allow that?

Thinking about this further, I think the problem is that we're talking
about two entirely different use cases:

1) cross-compiling a package to install into the sysroot, to be used
solely on Cygwin for cross-compile other software, which would follow
Cygwin packaging guidelines and use the system-default prefix;

2) cross-compiling software for use on another system (along the lines
of canadian-cross.cygclass), which would follow the *host*'s packaging
guidelines, or that of the user (at least wrt prefix).

These are two completely different scenarios and in order to cover both
of them w/o confusion, I think we should handle them separately,
particularly if (as I suspect) we are forced to prepend $CROSS_SYSROOT
to $prefix for case (1).

So how about this: leave cross.cygclass to handle case (1), since that
was what it was originally designed for, and make a new cygclass for
case (2), sort of like a generalized canadian-cross.cygclass (which
would be removed).  The API would look something like:

<NAMESPACE>_HOST="i686-pc-linux-gnu"
<NAMESPACE>_PREFIX="/usr/local"  # defaults to /mingw or /usr
inherit <namespace> [...]

The only question is what to use for <namespace>?


Yaakov