Questions on Targetting Commercial Unixes

[Nathan Kidd <nathan at hummingbird dot com>]

Hi,

I'm working on a project where I need to build a server application
(written in pure C) for several *nix hosts, including HP-UX 10.20, AIX
4.2, Solaris (x86) 2.6, Solaris (sparc) 2.5.1 and Linux (2.2+, x86), as
well as building for Win32.  Because some of these boxes are extremely old
and slow, and the complexities in co-ordinating a build on all of these
boxes make for unreliability, I'm trying to build cross compilers for all
these targets to run on Cygwin with a fast P4.

I easily built a working cygwin->i586-pc-linux-gnu gcc from binutils 2.3.2
and gcc 3.2.3, however for other platforms I've run into nothing but dead
ends (failed configures/compiles) and questions:

[Forgive any stupidity in these questions, I'm new at this and despite my
searching can't find clear answers.]

1) Most of the cross compiling references I've found deal with target OSes
of linux or embedded OSes and don't have a pre-existing runtime library. 
When building a cross compiler for a non-linux/embedded-os target (i.e.
one that already has it's own compiler & runtime library, like Solaris 2.6
x86), do I need to build glibc?  My initial thought was "no", but the
strange linker errors I get from my half-working i386-pc-Solaris2.6
targeted cross-toolchain make me unsure.

2) With a target of hppa1.1-hp-hpux10.20 and configuring binutils
(cygwin's binutils-20021117-1 package or the latest release 2.3.2)
configure warns that "ld" isn't supported for hppa.  If I can't build the
cross-linker then a cross-compiler is useless.  Does this mean it is not
currently possible to build a working cross-toolchain that targets hppa
machines or is there some other way around that I've missed?

3) Given the difficulties I've encountered I wonder has anyone tried to
target such a wide variety commercial unixes before? (Or do the more
experienced know better than to try?)

Thanks for any answers, references or insight you can give.

Regards,

-Nathan

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