Re: Hints for cross-compiling staprun?

[Grant Edwards <grant dot b dot edwards at gmail dot com>]

On 2010-08-30, Frank Ch. Eigler <fche@redhat.com> wrote:
> grant.b.edwards wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> I've hit a few glitches, but I'm making progress.  One issue is that
>> the configure script refuses to check for the existence of files when
>> cross-compiling.  [...]
>
> Perhaps we're using the wrong configure.ac directive to test for them.

I'm not sure, but I don't think so.

After googling the error message "cannot check for file existence when
cross compiling" it seems to be a common issue among people who
cross-compile things.  I didn't see any suggested solution other than
faking config cache entries by setting environment variables
indicating whether the file was to be considered present or not.

>> [...]
>> The other problem is that the sources use a number of non-standard
>> APIs without checking to see if they are, in fact, supported by the
>> build environment.  The ones that I tripped over are:
>>
>>    index,rindex   obsolete and not present in POSIX.1-2008.
>
> OK, will fix.

Thanks!

>>    __progname     doesn't seem to be part of any standard, and isn't
>>                   present in any headers on any Linux system I've got.
>
> (Where do we refer to that?)

Ah, my mistake.  That's an undefined symbol in libssp, and apparently
systemtap is the only thing on my target system that uses the
offending portion of that library.

>> It would result in a more graceful failure if the configure script
>> checked for those.
>
> Well, we should be able to presume plain POSIX, but a few more tests
> wouldn't hurt, I guess.

You're right.  You should be able to presume plain POSIX.  I wouldn't
bother adding tests for stuff that's required by POSIX.

>> [...]
>> If the systemtap Makefile.in is going to use "install-sh -D",
>> shouldn't it come with an install-sh that supports "-D"?
>
> I guess on native linux boxes it was using /usr/bin/install, which
> does understand -D.  We should be able to adapt that to some
> combination of -d / -t or mkdir -p.  Will fix.

It turns out that the only time that -D is used is when installing
examples.  Since there's no point in installing examples on a machine
that has only the runtime, I nuked that section of Makefile.in.  Now
it builds and installs without problems (haven't tried actually using
it yet).

Adding a --disable-examples option is preferable to patching
Makefile.in, but I haven't had time to figure out how to do that yet.

-- 
Grant Edwards               grant.b.edwards        Yow! I didn't order any
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