Re: Building RedBoot for SH3 targets with new toolchain

[John Dallaway <john at dallaway dot org dot uk>]

Hi Andrew

Andrew Lunn wrote:

>> Taking all these things into account, plus the desire to avoid further
>> delays to the eCos 3.0 release, I think it preferable to stick with the
>> stock mpfr and gmp DLLs for the Cygwin-hosted toolchains. We must
>> document the need to install the relevant Cygwin packages though, and
>> add an entry to the FAQ.
> 
> Would it be possible to detect at build time if these DLLs are
> installed? But a custom build rule with the highest priority in infra,
> or HAL which will test if this files exist and stop and print an
> useful error message if they are not installed?
> 
> The way cygwin is silently failing is not nice...

The failure mode is certainly not nice. I expect that the mpfr and gmp
DLLs are loaded explicitly by the compiler using LoadLibrary() and
failure is not being reported at the application level.

We could emit a _warning_ message using a custom rule. An _error_
message would be too strong since older toolchains do not use mpfr and
gmp. However, it seems cleaner to keep such testing out of the build
process and perform the tests in the eCos install script instead when
the relevant toolchains are being installed. Having said that, I
appreciate that experienced eCos developers may not use the install script.

John Dallaway